Disparity
by Eridanus1123
Summary: She looks older, prettier. Her face has matured, her hair has slimmed down. She looks like the sort of girl he goes for, nowadays.
1. Chapter 1

They're supposed to be grownups now; they're supposed to be past petty fights and spiteful glances. They're supposed to have their lives neat and organised into _workmoneyfamilyfriends_, into categories with thick unblurring lives, and to be mature and composed at all times.

It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. She was supposed to marry Ron - maybe kids, maybe a dog to keep Crookshanks company; he was supposed to get sucked into a downward spiral of vice and guilt until he was inevitably put out of his misery and betrothed to some society darling.

_She_'s still with Ron, and _he_ still has a few vices and plenty of guilt. Things don't feel as though they're going according to plan. She hasn't reached that level of wise peace that she's spent her formative years aching for, and he still finds himself acting as though he never left school.

They're both living alone in flats in London, (within an astonishingly small radius of one another, unbeknownst to them) and Ron has tried to get her to move into his house a million times, and for months now he's been so close to skipping out on London and falling back into his _privileged-white-male_ routine back at the Manor. It would be so easy, for both of them.

She's taking the train to work because she hates Floo powder and she figured out long ago that this is the next smartest way to get around the city. She's settled into her routine with grace, and now the regular commuters know her name and greet her with pleasant banter before she settles into the seat with a book.

His car's been rear-ended in the mid-morning traffic for the third time in a year, and so he has converted to public transport until it's repaired.

He walks into _her_ carriage with his shoulder bag slung, ever so aptly, over his shoulder and his tie sort of loose and crooked the way it had always been at school.

And he stops.

She looks older, prettier. Her face has matured, her hair has slimmed down. She looks like the sort of girl he goes for, nowadays.

She looks up from a page of lyrical description and finds herself eye-to-eye with the tall, jaunty blond man who she might have found appealing if he wasn't so achingly familiar.

She hates him.

(She really wants to, anyway.)

He feels terribly guilty, in a way that had almost evaded him for the past seven years, and it knots in his stomach and catches in his throat.

(He had always wanted to apologise to her especially. Now was his chance.)

They both search for words, for snappy opening lines or mature grown-up greetings. He stumbles on the first syllable of the only thing his mind offers: "Her-mione", sort of choked_gasped_ out in a way that might just be able to be passed off as shock at seeing her.

"Malfoy." She gives a small smile, as thin and joyless as she could produce without detracting from the politeness of the action. She's trying to be mature, to be pleasant and to register the look on his face with unseeing eyes as though she doesn't understand what's going through his head.

It's been years since she's seen him last, and her adult life has been startlingly devoid of any of those chance encounters that seemed to happen every second day with other people. She has bustled around this corner of the city, invaded every coffee shop and book store in her search for happiness. She only barely wonders at the lack of contact - he's one to spend time in bars and sex shops - until he's edging into the compartment and sitting on the other seat.

She wants to redirect her concentration back to her book, because he's too close and it's _ohsoempty _for the first morning in weeks.

Politeness is not a skill, she tells herself, in that stern tone of voice she saves for persuasion in the face of a supremely undesirable task. It is a habit adopted through practice. She has to practise on Draco Malfoy, because anything short of politeness will inevitably devolve into fury and drawn wands. She doesn't want to be held responsible for what she'll do to him if she gets her wand in her hand and the frog out of her throat.

Here, alone in this tiny train compartment that brings too-vivid flashbacks from their Hogwarts days, it's impossible to act as though they're pleasant school acquaintances, but they try all the same.

"How have you been?" he ventures, laying his bag carefully by his polished shoes. He still takes pride in his appearance; his tie is precisely matched to the odd graybluegreen of his eyes.

"Fine - good. And you?"

It's too clipped, too formal. All of a sudden, listening to her response and being hit in the stomach with the following realisation that this is the way it would be, there isn't enough oxygen in the compartment and he needs to get away.

He forces himself to grind a little deeper into the upholstery and answer through barely-gritted teeth: "Yes, I've been- good, too."

There's too much of that swirling volatile emotion in a too-small space, because no matter how hard they try, they aren't pleasant school acquaintances, and it isn't just their petty childhood feud that's standing between them. For her, it's that whole thing where he turned to the (inevitable) dark side and betrayed them all, where he was responsible for the deaths of people she cared about. For him, it's that guilt, in a solid, impassable block, and he's had so much time to think about this moment and to form the words that they've slipped clean out of his head.

(For some reason, he remembers seeing her blood-smeared, dirty face in the midst of the fray and horror of the Battle of Hogwarts, meeting his eyes and staring at him with a hateful reproach before dodging curses and throwing hexes and resubmerging back into a battle he had helped to cause. That, more than anything, had replayed over and over in his mind, on a sickening loop. He had wanted to apologise for that for seven years.)

He watches her slip her book into her bag and he shifts uncomfortably. She's far more composed than he is, pushing her manageable hair back from her face and adjusting the collar of her blouse.

Her hands are trembling as she tugs at her shirt, and she feels as though every quake and twitch of her muscles is magnified and supremely obvious. She doesn't want him to see that she's having trouble with this- him.

It had been seven years. It was time to put this behind her - Fred, Dumbledore, Remus, Tonks - and grit her teeth and smile her way through the next six minutes.

He watches her teeth grind, hears the stony silence and the way she stares right ahead with a vague forced sort of smile on her face.

He knows what she's thinking. It's spelt all too clearly across her face.

"Where are you working, nowadays?"

He breaks the silence. She'd like to slap the genial half-smile from across his face. It isn't arrogant anymore; he looks as though the past few years have humbled him.

She's forced to answer him, trying to make eye contact without seeing other people reflected in his gray eyes - cold, dead faces; they drifted so easily, with their pallid faces matching his pallid irises.

"I work for the Ministry of Magic."

"That sounds interesting. What department?"

"Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. You know. Elvish welfare, and the like."

He does know. He once found a crumpled brochure for S.P.E.W. in the bottom of his trunk, and had found it more interesting than he had cared to admit.

Her fingernails bite at her thigh through the material of her skirt. He notices.

"Where do you work?" she asks, and she's adopted a tone of civility that grates. He almost wants her to be furious with him, to openly snark and argue and yell.

"I, er, at a publishing company. I edit manuscripts."

She's surprised. He had never shown much acumen for anything other than jackassery at school; she is shocked that his career had taken the path that hers might have.

The train grinds to a halt, and suddenly she's collecting herself and her things. She doesn't mumble out a perfunctory, "Well, this is my stop," as she was originally inclined to, but instead briskly winds a scarf around her neck and says, "It was nice to see you, Malfoy," before she steps out onto the platform and strides off into the crowd.

The doors slide closed on Draco before he realises that that was his stop, too. He doesn't fight against the doors, and the train slips away on the tracks with him still on it, thinking about the girl he used to hate, once upon a time.

* * *

The next day, his car is repaired, but he takes the train, anyway.

* * *

She doesn't look up when he enters the carriage; her nose remains firmly entrenched in whatever dusty tome she's studying. He isn't sure whether she's being rude or just so preoccupied that she hasn't noticed his presence - he's seen her read through a ten-person brawl without breaking concentration - but he doesn't take offence. He sits down on the seat opposite to her and stares at his fingernails and a grass stain on his right knee.

When she looks up, he's sitting there, looking the epitome of casual elegance, and her hopes that yesterday was a one-time thing scatter wistfully into the wind.

She knows, logically, how to behave; her mind rebels and her mouth forms a sour line before she can force it to smile. He seems to notice and, more astounding, he doesn't fling a snarky comeback or glare at her through beady ferret eyes. He laughs, to himself and under his breath as though she isn't entirely supposed to hear this. His eyes crinkle in the outer corners. She'd never noticed that before.

"Oh, Hermione - you've changed."

Yes, she has. She's olderwiserbetterdressed, and the younger her had always known to keep her mouth shut. She's a bit more impulsive nowadays; without Harry and Ron to reign back so much, she's taken to converting that energy into something more productive. Sometimes, things slip through the cracks.

"Not so much," she answers instead, and pulls herself together enough - _FredDumbledoreRemusTonks _- to smile at him.

He's taken aback, and his eyebrows fly upwards. He didn't expect friendliness, even such an obviously flawed facsimile. He expected the brisk professionalism of yesterday, or barely repressed rudeness on finding him here again. He ought to have known, though, that in the face of trouble she would unflinchingly fake a sense of decorum.

"Hermione," he begins. From the opposite side of the compartment, she sees how easily now his lips slip over a name he had once spat. He's smiling, a little lopsidedly, and there are those same crinkles in his eyes. He looks too friendly, uncharacteristically so. But he's got this expression on his face, nervous and withdrawn and a bit sad, that's easily visible through the thin smile. So she puts on her best listening face, and waits.

"I- I want you to know that I've changed, too, for all it's worth."

He's finding it difficult to keep the bitter voice in his head hidden, the one that used to have a direct path to his mouth. Now, it provides commentary in his mind, because a leopard can't change its spots all in a day and there are some things he doesn't want to completely destroy. He can't lose his entire personality; it isn't that easy. But he's managed to compartmentalise and to confine it to a tiny voice that chirps out acerbic spurts every now and again.

He's thinking about how much of a wanker he sounds, about how if he saw any other person speaking like this he'd be mimicking them and snickering behind his hand. Still, he can't help but hope that Hermione's kept that compassionate part of her that had always inclined her to listen politely to his insults before flinging a hex at his head. If he can appeal to that part, he might have a chance at draining away some of the guilt that's been weighing down his chest for seven years.

She watches his head tilt to the side just like it always used to. He would be sitting in class and stare at the teacher with his head on an angle and a challenging expression on his face, just _waiting _for them to reprimand him so he can write to his daddy. One eyebrow would bend and creep like a slug up his forehead, and, satisfied, he would shift in his seat and then slump back into it.

She wonders at the fact that she's so well versed in the motions of a boy she hasn't seen in seven years, who she had devoted the utmost attention to ignoring for the seven years before that. Only for a moment, though, because she quite quickly realises: ignoring is the wrong word.

_He's serious._ She knows, because all of the arrogance has dripped away from the familiar movement and he's looking so sombre and piteous that she almost forgives him.

Only almost.

"I'm not sure what it's worth," she says, her eyebrows furrowing and creasing, "but I appreciate it, anyway."

It's all he could have expected as a response. He's momentarily satisfied, but not fully sated.

He's going to try again. She can see the cogs turning in his mind, can see him start to open his mouth to say something that isn't quite fully formed yet.

She stops him, because if she squints and turns her head, he almost looks like the sort of boy she would go for, and she knows that if he keeps being apologetic and wretched, she's going to do something stupid (because the pathetic ones always seem to get her).

"This is my stop."

It isn't, but all thoughts of work have flown from her mind and she's forming plans to visit Ginny (she always seems to know what to do, and Hermione's never needed guidance more than she does now). She's long overdue for a personal day, anyway.

He watches her flee the train without looking back, hurrying dangerously across the train tracks to board one headed south, to the beach. He thinks he's going to drive to work tomorrow.


	2. Chapter 2

She had always thought that perhaps he had a seed of goodness entrenched deep inside him, that all the years of tormenting and obnoxious behaviour might fade into the background as he redeems himself with something heroic. Because, really, for years there, that had been all that mattered. Your loyalties, your bravery, your cowardice, your loved ones killed before your eyes. Everything had been in those simple terms and seemed so incredibly complex that everything else was just extraneous and forgotten.

She thinks she's seen it in his eyes before, a glimmer of humanity in fluorescent lighting. She remembers seeing it on his face when his aunt had tortured her in his family home, when she held a knife to her throat and he registered the trickling blood. She's certain that he isn't a monster, but he's a coward.

(It isn't quite enough.)

It's only when she's sitting at Ginny's kitchen table with her feet dangling from a stool and a mug clutched between her fingers that she realises that Ginny's been staring at her for ten minutes and she hasn't said a word.

"Sorry, what did you say?" It isn't much of an excuse for blanking out so thoroughly, but she's too tired for excuses. She's sick of coddling people - her colleagues, her friends, strangers - to be polite. For once, she wants the blunt truth.

Ginny exhales heavily, weary, and Hermione isn't sure what she's done wrong but she feels inexplicably guilty for making Ginny look at her like that.

"I said," and she comes to stand by Hermione's side with her hand on her shoulder and her convex stomach against her back, "that... it's been seven years."

She understands the guilt tinging Ginny's tone, but can't repress the disgust. She turns, wide eyed, to ask, "Fred?"

Ginny closes her eyes and a shudder ripples through her, from her head to her toes. Her breathing is shallow - the only thing Hermione can hear is the rain beating against the windows and their two breaths, alternating on different beats. She wants to kick herself, to be punished for making her best friend look like that.

Hermione swallows. "I'm- I'm so sorry, Ginny; I didn't mean-"

"It's been seven years," Ginny repeats, stronger this time. "Malfoy isn't the one you should blame for all of this."

Hermione keeps her mouth closed, lips pressed together so tightly she feels as though they might bleed. She's done enough damage.

"Hermione. Listen to me. It's been hard, it's been- I mean, I still have nightmares about it- we have to move on. Harry and I? We're happy; we're working through it. You've got to start to heal, because you just aren't the same."

_As though it's so easy. Get married, have a baby, paint the walls of the nursery the same colour that parentless Teddy Lupin's had been, and everything will start to fall back into normalcy. _

She wishes that their recipe for happiness was universal, but it's as though she's skipped a few steps and the end result is devastating. She's back in sixth year and Harry is skimming through Potions so easily when she's the one doing everything right. Now, she wants his shortcuts, wants them more than anything. If she thought moving in with Ron, marrying him, would haul everything back onto its correct track, she would, in a heartbeat.

It isn't that easy. That's a specialised formula that only seems to work for Harry; none of the rest of them seemed to land breaks like that. He and Ginny have always been like that, though. Impervious to it all, content in their _themness_. She's jealous, but knows that the burden must fall on him heavier than Ginny's letting on, than Ginny knows.

Really, they've been married for years, and she stills feels that she knows him better than Ginny could ever dream to. Yes, Ginny knows his favourite brand of toothpaste and the sort of things he talks about in the dead of night when he's feeling his worst, but Hermione does, too, and she feels as though there's so much more to him than that. After all, they're _the Golden Trio_, not _the Golden Quartet_ or _Harry-and-Ginny-andthoseothertwokids_. That won't ever change.

It's the same with Ron; they fit so easily into one another that it's like a jigsaw puzzle they've done every day they've been alive. She can do it with her eyes closed, on her head, back to front - it's like breathing, because he's so much a part of her that they're barely three people anymore. It's the reason she doesn't want to move in with him - not because she doesn't love him; she does, like anything - but because she isn't sure she wants those seams to become invisible. Ginny and Harry have a thick seam right down the middle of them: he's the Boy Who Lived, the one who Saved The World. That sort of thing isn't easy to forget.

She isn't sure why she's the one who's stuck. She's on track with her dream career, and she has the nicely furnished flat and the boyfriend who doesn't need words to know what she's thinking. She was the one Most Likely To Succeed, with the grades and the intelligence, and despite all that, despite the fact that in the check list of life goals she's well on her way, she feels stuck.

Perhaps it's that her mother can't quite seem to wrap her tongue around the word 'Hermione' anymore, that she's had to explain, "_Her-my-own-nee_," just as she'd been taught as a toddler, and that still a _Hermia_ slips in every once in a while, a disjointed _Her-moine_.

Her father wears his wristwatch on the wrong hand, nowadays, with the face on the back of his wrist instead of on the inside of it. Her mother does her hair differently, parted on the other side, and they've swapped favourite colours and both seem to have forgotten the importance of flossing.

Whenever she notices things like that, she feels like less of a witch, as though she had addled their brains on the way back into normalcy. She doesn't dare try to fix the damage. She's scared stiff that something important will go wrong this time - not just inconsequential habits that make her heart catch in her throat.

She meets George for coffee once a month, aside from all of the crowded family dinners and birthday parties and wedding showers. They've done something to his ear; Harry had remembered muttered incantations from Snape healing Malfoy in the bathroom. It doesn't look the same as it used to, and he's got a dragon fang like his other brother's (all of his brothers had that adjective attached to them, now) dangling from his normal ear to distract from it.

They meet because she had always liked the twins and the feeling had been mutual, despite clashing personalities, and now that Fred's gone, she and George are more similar than most would realise. He seems to notice that she's still a bit damaged as well, and it's quite comforting to sit in moderate silence with someone who's in the same broken state.

(Secretly, she knows that George must think her the biggest hypocrite in the world; he lost his _brother_ after all, and her parents are safely tucked away in a townhouse in Brighton.)

Ginny hugs her from behind, with some difficulty; her stomach seems to be getting in the way more and more often as the months slip by. "Let's talk of happier things," she says, swiping at the coffee pot with agility that seemed to have heightened. "How's that brother of mine, anyway?"

Hermione hadn't seen Ron that day, or the one before, because she knew that the moment their eyes met, he would know that something was the matter and, in his own clueless way, figure it out. When the mood takes him, Ron could be astonishingly clever and, more than that, he knows how to make her talk. He'll throw a purposeful comment and she'll pounce on it, and the rant that pours forth will inevitably incorporate elements of what's on her mind until she's crying in his arms on the sofa as he rubs gentle circles into her back.

She makes a mental note to call him when she gets back to the flat. She's all of a sudden not sure that talking to him about this would be a bad thing - he, after all, understands it all better than anyone.

"He's well, I think- it's been a few days, actually; work's been busy."

"He told me he asked you to move in with you again." Ginny speaks contemplatively; she's given up trying to weasel a reason out of Hermione after all this time.

"Well, yes. He did, but it wasn't a big affair. Off-handed - he expected me to turn him down."

"Are you ever going to say yes?" Ginny devotes her attention to arranging biscuits on a plate instead of meeting Hermione's eyes. She doesn't try to fix her with a piercing gaze so much anymore. She's accepted it.

Hermione picks at her plate, awkwardly readjusted her shirt. "I need my own space, Ginny. I love him, but- I need somewhere different to come home to."

It isn't the truth, in the strictest sense of the word. Ron isn't clingy or invasive, and he values his Quidditch time as much as she does her study. Being around him for weeks, months, _years_ at a time doesn't feel like a punishment; they've been used to spending every waking second together since they were eleven.

She has her own reasons, but they would sound crazy if she repeated them to Ginny and worse if she tried to explain them to Ron. This, at least, Ginny understands, even if she has difficulty agreeing with the logic.

So she keeps things short, simple, and notentirelytruthful. It's the easiest way to go around someone like Ginny, after all.

"He wants to marry you, you know. Are you going to say no to that, as well?"

(She thinks about it a lot.)

"I-I haven't thought about it."

(She knows exactly what she would say.)

"I don't really know how I'd react.

She can envision the entire scene, word for word, exactly as it would play out. It would be romantic and simple, and he would have given it months of thought and asked everyone he could think of, and she would ask him _why_ because, just once, she would need to know, and he would get pink in the ears and red in the face as he spoke, and they would talk about it for a while, about how everyday scenes in their future would occur, and she would cry and end up saying yes and never meaning it more.

She thinks about it a lot.

There seems to be such a definitive difference in her mind between _living together_ and _marriage_, between _hey babe, let's shack up_ and _I love you and want to spend the rest of our lives together_. She knows (_god, she knows_) that Ron has the best of intentions, but she can't help but keep drawing over that line in thick, black marker.

"Hermione, cut the bullshit - he's an idiot, but he's not as stupid as you think. He's worried, Hermione, that there's a reason you won't let him look after you."

"Reason?" she echoes blindly, eyes wandering aimlessly over the eggshell of the walls.

"Another man," Ginny puts bluntly. "He hasn't said so specifically, but I know him; I can see in his eyes that he's scared."

Hermione isn't offended, or hurt, that Ron would think so badly of her. Quite the contrary: she's overwhelmed by a wave of extraordinary pity and guilt, and she intensifies and adds to the resolution of visiting him that afternoon.

She really doesn't blame him. Sometimes she's distant, and sometimes she works almost too much to be plausible. She is, though - working, that is - and cheating just isn't in her genetic makeup.

"I should go." She stands up, rinses her cup and plate and Ginny's, too, just for good measure. Ginny stays in the half-rising position in her chair, expression breaking and guilty as she realises what she's implied.

"Hermione, I didn't mean-"

"No, it's all right. I just think I ought to get back to work. Thanks for the talk. Say hello to Harry."

"Wait- we were going to look at the nursery-"

She stops by the front door, and smiles as kindly as she can about her best friend, lumbering towards her on unsteady feet. "You should rest, Gin- you're looking lovely, by the way."

She doesn't relish the wash of emotion she's left behind her, and she doesn't go back to work. She sits in an unfamiliar compartment of the train (at the end instead of the middle, just in case) and then she snaps a heel jogging to Ron's house in the post-snow slush, and she kisses him hard as soon as he opens the door and they fall backwards onto the couch and it's not so much about crying and back rubbing as it is about heat and closeness and -_ohgod-_ love.


	3. Chapter 3

He's at work, and his concentration is skipping away from the sentences he's supposed to be destructing with red ink and onto far more perplexing topics. Grammar is easy - words just seem to _fit_ - but he has a lot more difficulty trying to comprehend all the aspects of Hermione that have conglomerated into these strange encounters.

Eventually, he lays down the pen.

(He's never been very good at focusing on more than one thing at a time.)

The way she skipped off the train had troubled him. She troubled him. He doesn't like being troubled at work - believe it or not, he tries to work to his full potential and to wait until it's lonely and familiar in his flat with a bottle of something amber before he lets the trouble come back.

Normally (if it were anyone else), he wouldn't care. He would shrug it off and give a biting comment, and return to the ordinary _normalcy_ of his day to day life, where he doesn't think about girls-with-brown-hair and keep seeing her on street corners.

For some reason (he doesn't know, and he's fairly eager not to give it much thought) he's annoyed that they keep meeting like this - strange, stilted, sporadic - and that he's thinking almost alliteratively - brownbrown(beautiful)_brown_ - and he gets it, he really does. He wouldn't forgive him either, if he were her, but he isn't sure that it's forgiveness he's looking for. It's as though he's only just been spat out of the tangled web that it had caused, and he's looking to neaten and tie up every loose end. He isn't going to go on a worldwide quest to apologise to everyone he's wronged, but for some reason, he knows that she _counts._

He remembers when her eyes flashed with something notwetatall just before her fist cocked back and hit him in the jaw, and he remembers the way he kept cracking it for days afterwards, still incredulous that he'd been hit, by a _girl_, by a _mudblood_, by a know-it-all bookworm with upper body strength confined to plucking heavy books off the top shelf. The look in her eyes had been enough to warn him, and he ought to have known to run then, because it said, _you're not going to mess with me anymore_.

He'd taken no notice.

_She counts._

He catches his boss' eye and hurriedly returns to the manuscript he's skimming through. The company publishes young adult fiction, and it's his turn to man the slush pile.

(If he has to read one more vampire love story, he's going to seriously consider bashing his brains out with it.)

He likes his job, most of the time, and he loves the feeling of productivity when he sneaks into the storage room for a freshly minted copy of a book he's edited. Perhaps he should have done something more fulfilling, but there aren't many job openings for un-graduated un-friendly un-ambitious prats, and all things considered, he's happy where he is.

He had gotten into the Muggle world with some misgivings, but anywhere was better than a (decidedly un-Cheer-y) place where everyone knows his name and that he isn't much good at anything. He had liked not being judged, he had liked repressing his magic, and he had settled in quickly. His bigotry had vanished (and really, he puts that down to the battle, because letting go of his pride was an easy step he could take towards redeeming himself).

There's a pad of yellow sticky notes in the right hand corner of his desk, and he scrawls a few notes on one and slaps it on the manuscripts. He's going to set it aside and take it home with him to finish reading before he can decide whether it'll make it to the publishers.

His fingers flick over a blank note, and he pauses, just momentarily, just long enough for the idea in his head to _thud_ to a stop at the front of his skull.

* * *

She leaves Ron's house early in the morning, and it's a good thing she didn't quite make it to work the day before because her colleagues would _definitely_ notice if she showed up in the same clothes. He comes to the door, even though he technically doesn't have to be awake for another hour. His hair is sticking up, and the gray t-shirt wrinkles between her fingers as she kisses him goodbye.

He had offered to drive her to the train station - hell, to drive her the whole way - but she tells him to go back to bed, she loves him, have a nice day. She enjoys the walk, with the early crisp air stinging against her cheeks and blowing away the scent of _his_ shampoo and _his _soap. She feels decidedly more herself by the time she reaches the train, and when she's settling (blissfully uninterrupted) into her usual seat with a book, it's as though everything's the same.

Her fingers play and fiddle; she has difficulty keeping still on mornings that she has coffee before nine. They linger, along the edge of the seat, along the seam of the fabric, along the metal frame-

Her fingers fix around a slip of paper that's somehow become affixed to the metal surface. Red pen, thick and pointed.

_I'm sorry. For everything. It'll mean nothing to you but you've no idea how it's clenched and solidified in the pit of my stomach for the past seven years. Get this, Granger - I'm different, now. That's why I'm not going to bother you anymore._

She gets it. Oh, she gets it.

Even alone in the compartment, she wants to flee at the next stop. He isn't even in the same space, but she still - instinctively - wants to run. From him. Because he makes her think of it all just when she's almost shoved it down.

She slips the note into her bag. She's never really categorised people like this before (except him, badbad_bad_) but she thinks she's a good person. So, really, when faced with a boy who's obviously desperate for something (forgiveness? relief? friendship? _what does he want from her?_), it's her duty to do the right thing.

She doesn't write back to him, but on her break, she gets out the phone book.

* * *

It's raining by lunchtime; she can see it through the frosted glass of her office window. The phone number of his direct extension - acquired from the helpful receptionist, Mary, who giggles a little as she offers to put her through - sits on a scrap of paper in front of her. It took her about two minutes - to compile a mental list of publishing companies and cross reference it against the train route, and then weed out the unsuccessful candidates - but she's spent the rest of the morning working up the courage, and it's only now that she can confidently punch the numbers into her cell phone.

He's surprised to hear her - she knows, because he says so - and there are several moments of awkward, deafening silence before he asks tentatively, "So, what's the matter?"

He doesn't sound nervous, she realises, or hopeful or worried. He sounds resigned, as though the conversation's already played out in his head.

He doesn't think she understands the tone in his voice - her startled pause tells him that she's noticed it. He isn't nervous or hopeful or worried, and he wants her to get it out, her last word, the final say, so that he can go on his merry way. He had effectively lobbed the ball into her court, and this was her way of setting it on fire and hurling it back towards his head.

He doesn't dare hope for mercy.

She explains, and it's full of long pauses and quick silences, until, all in a rush at the end of her paragraph of run-on sentences, he grasps at the meaning amidst the straws and he takes a shot in the dark.

"Would you like to have lunch with me? Or, coffee, or breakfast, or something?"

The words hang in the air, unanswered. He feels a fool, but it isn't the first time.

The silence is shocking; he can hear strange bursts of exploding magic on her end of the telephone, and he tries to remember what she does, again.

"...Where?"

"Sorry?" His eyes had drifted towards the blotter on his desk, and he had been scrubbing at it with his thumbnail to try and dislodge a crusted crumb of food. She had caught him off guard, and he's utterly startled to hear her voice.

"I said, wh-"

"No, sorry, I did hear you- erm, there's a café between your work and mine, by the post office."

She wonders, momentarily, at how he knows where she works, but she remembers _alltooquickly_ that she had told him about her departmental gig, and the Ministry is one of those buildings that every wizard recognises.

She isn't surprised that the question is answered so mundanely. That seems to be the theme of her life whenever she jumps to conclusions.

"I can meet you in ten minutes." She hangs up before he has a chance to say anything, _because_, she reminds herself, _she's in control, this time._ This time, she's going to be the one with the upper hand and the nose long enough to look down him at, because she's going to be kind and polite and hear him out, but he's still the one who got her friends killed.

* * *

He's gotten punctual; she's gotten less so. On the way to the lobby, she gets stopped by a man with what looks like a baby griffin leashed to his belt, and it's another ten minutes before she's cleared that mess and walks into the café where he's already seated.

Today, his tie is the colours of his old school house, thin swirling lines, and she doesn't forget to note the symbolism. She doesn't expect for him to really have changed so much.

"Hi." He stands, sort of awkwardly, and shifts so that she can get into her seat. They're pressed into a corner, surrounded by people, and it's not uncomfortable at all.

(_She's never as good a liar when she's tired._)

She decides that she's had enough of him taking grand leaps into unknown territory, and so sits primly down with her bag on her lap and says, "I- we should talk, because obviously there are a few things between us that need to be sorted out."

"Couldn't agree more," he mumbles into his cup of coffee. She's almost certain that she wasn't supposed to hear his remark. A moment later, out loud and in this peculiar tone he doesn't recognise, he says, "I meant it, you know. Things are different, now."

_We're_ different, she substitutes in her mind, and she almost regrets joining him with her into an 'us', a 'we'.

(But she doesn't, because it's true.)

He looks at her, and he prays that she can read it in his eyes because he doesn't want to have to say it aloud (writing it was hard enough).

She stares back, and her eyes are harder than he's ever seen them. He remembers the way they used to be wet and dark and soft, always staring balefully at him as she flung back a response. Now, they're so solid (still dark, still wet), the light above cutting white slashes into the colour, that they almost crack in two.

_purefuckinggranite._

She's going to make him say it.

"I'm sorry."

"For?" she prompts, not even blinking, and something breaks.

"For all of your friends, for all of it- for being a worthless prat when I should have been a man, for betraying everyone, for- for fucking everything up, and I swear, I didn't know what to do-"

He isn't almost crying (_shhh_) because he's a man now (_but still, not so much_) and instead his breath is coming in thick ragged chokes and she's staring at him like she's seeing him in a new light.

"I never thought I would hear you say that," she says, and he's almost full of fury and hatred that she can be so cavalier when he's just let everything rush out through a rip in his chest.

And then he realises that at some point, her hand has stretched across the sticky table and covered his.

She tightens her grip, because she knows that he's realised, and seven years ago, they wouldn't be caught dead touching but now they're hanging on for all they're worth and the past fourteen years don't seem to matter so much, anymore.

* * *

It isn't as though they're friends now.

They aren't.

But now that he's opened up, she does, too, and they stay in the café far longer than their allotted lunch breaks, just talking. Somehow, it's easier talking to the boy she used to detest, because he doesn't know her so intimately that he feels the need to analyse every choice she's made.

She wouldn't admit it, but he's actually a good listener, once she struggles past all of the despicable aspects of his personality.

(_It isn't that much of a struggle_.)

They start by talking about the battle, about how he felt watching his aunt almost slit her throat, about how she had seen something in his eyes and hoped desperately that he would do something-

-and his voice breaks when he tries to respond to that comment.

He describes how lonely he's felt - as though what he's done is so awful that he doesn't deserve to be forgiven, to move on - and she says that he's right, he doesn't (but she's willing to give it a try).

She goes over her mirrored feelings of motionlessness, the way she feels like something's inherently wrong even though that check list is glimmering with gold stars.

And they realise the value of talking to one another: _they understand_. He's picked up the ability to empathise, somewhere along the road, and she listens to him with eyes that melt a little softer as the minutes tick by.

They exchange phone numbers, and it's clumsy and embarrassing, but they flounder on with the kerfuffle over finding pens and spare sticky notes (they both carry them on their person) because they know that it's a strange sort of perfect harmony to find someone to talk to like this. They're removed, but not strangers; they're polite, but not close. It seems to be a winning formula (and she's got something right, this time).

When he chances a glance at his watch and her eyes follow his, they both jump to their feet and push the stacked mountain of empty coffee cups aside. He goes one way, she goes the other.

The next day, he takes the train again.


	4. Chapter 4

She's high up in the Department for Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, but her long (triple-its-usual-time) lunch, in combination with her spur-of-the-moment personal day yesterday, lands her a trip to the boss.

"Really, Hermione- I'm getting a bit worried. Are you sure everything's alright?"

Because that's how it had always been, hadn't it? If she was anything but perfect, it was, '_are you feeling alright? do you have a temperature?_'

She's flushed red in the face, but she had run the three blocks from the café in high heels. Comparatively speaking, she feels fine with a side of dandy.

"I'm fine," she reassures, and she's dismissed, as easy as that. She wonders what it would take for Earl to raise his voice with her, but decides just to be grateful for the leniency. She's never needed it before; perhaps he's just doling out her unused allowance of the last three years.

She hopes never to need it again, but then feels the rough edge of folded paper against her thigh. Draco's phone number (and address - for good measure) in her pocket. She feels warm and light, still a little flushed. She had hoped to get this mess with him out of the way today, but it's suddenly less of a mess and more of an unexpected surprise. For once, a confrontation with Draco Malfoy has left her feeling less heavy, less guilty.

It's an unexpected feeling, but she welcomes it as best she can.

* * *

He whiles the day away doing snippets of work in between long bouts of boredom and Spider Solitaire, level _hard_. He's lucky it's a slow day at the office, or he'd be missing his man-parts and crying out for his mother before he could blink for taking such a long lunch break. It's still raining, even though it oh-so-politely let up when they ran from the café in separate directions. This is the weather he likes, that he craves, but for once the fact that it presents itself for thoughtfulness is undesirable. He's got nothing to think about. He feels as though his fuzzy brain's been scraped from the inside out and polished with something that has 'super strength' in its title, because he has just spoken about all of those things that fill his mind, things that he thinks about on rainy days, to Hermione Granger, in a coffee shop around the corner from her work.

_Mind-blowing._

It seems so strange that this morning he was wiping his hands of her and vowing _very seriously_ (untruthfully) that he didn't give a damn what Hermione Granger thought of him-

And now they've swapped addresses and it seems almost as though things are never going to be the same, there. It's nearly like they're about to become friends, maybe more (because her skin, when she held his hand, had been _eversosoft_) - and to an undiscerning eye, in the reflection of the café window, they looked like any other couple in there with their heads close together and their eyes alight and animated and their hands - ohtheirhands - just almost-touching on the table.

He knows not to get in over his head, or to jump to conclusions or anything, because really, it was just a friendly catch-up.

So he takes up his pen again and tries not to think about the way his head isn't pounding with the bitter, snarky voice anymore - there's only peace.

* * *

"Hermione?"

"Ginny? I've been trying to get through to you. How are you?"

"Swollen ankles and a craving for buttermilk, pepperoni and grapes. Enough information for you?"

"Plenty, I assure you, and I certainly hope those aren't going into the same blender."

"I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the preparation of my new favourite meal. What's new with you, Hermione? It's been too long."

"Nothing to report. You?"

"Oh, come on, don't play coy - the last time we spoke, Malfoy was stalking you and you were in a rage. You've got to update me, or we're no longer friends."

"Nothing happened. I- we spoke. It was... unexpectedly nice."

"You're kidding."

"He listened. It was actually kind of nice, to be able to talk about it all with someone new. We sort of bonded."

"You and Malfoy, bonding?"

"He spoke, apologised, and I listened, and then I spoke, and he listened, and- I don't know, I felt for him. As though perhaps he's grown a bit of sense, or a soul or something. He looked as though he was about to cry. We- held hands."

"Hermione..."

"What? What's that tone?"

"Don't go there. Don't even _think_ of going there."

"Weren't you encouraging this? You were the one who was all 'it's been seven years, it isn't his fault'!"

"I didn't want you to separate him from his limbs, Hermione - I didn't want _this_!"

"Ginny-"

"No! Do you have any idea what it would do to my brother, the two of you being friends? You can't do this to him."

"I'm not doing a thing to him, Ginny-"

"You're a hypocrite, Hermione Granger."

"I suppose you're entitled to your opinion."

"Hermione-? Don't hang up on-"

* * *

For a few days, Draco and Hermione don't speak, and it's nothing to be concerned about - it isn't like they're friends. They're not going to spend every waking minute together. They're just two people who happen to be screwed up in a similar way.

Then, the days stretch into weeks, and he starts to get a little concerned. Not for her safety - he'd know, surely, if something had happened to her - but for the possibility that their conversation was just a one-off.

It wouldn't bother him, or anything, except that he'd wasted a precious post-it note writing down his phone number and address for her, and... post-its don't grow on trees, or anything.

His phone remains (blissfully?) silent with the volume turned up extra loud so he doesn't miss her call.

* * *

She hopes he's gotten the message - the symbolic message, that is, because if she tried to communicate this with him through any physical mode, she would inevitably end up spilling her secrets to him again. She hasn't called him. She hasn't given him a second thought, because now, with her insides cleaned out and her troubles vocalised, she feels as though she can continue on as normal.

Better than normal. It's unnecessary to involve emotions and human connections in such mundane tasks as what was, essentially, a mechanical service for her brain. Pull apart, adjust, polish until squeaky clean. That's all it was.

* * *

It seems oddly poetic (but mostly just aches uncomfortably) when he finally grasps the fact that she's stopped speaking to him. The guilt floods back - because he's managed to screw up even this mangled half-reparation of the damage - and he's well aware of the cosmic joke played upon him. This was retribution, the universe's way of getting back at him through someone he'd quite grown to care about-

That is to say, she'd grown on him. He doesn't care about people, remember?

It's not as though he misses her, or anything. They had, what, two conversations? The problem is that something in his mind is snapping its fingers with a wistful 'damn' for what could've been. It doesn't feel as though he's just severed ties with Hermione Granger, know-it-all extraordinaire, which by all rights would have seemed a blessing to him only years earlier.

(It's as though they're just two people who met in a coffee shop.)

He doesn't plan on thinking about her, ever again. When their children meet at Hogwarts in the distant future - no, not even then. He isn't going to subject his progeny to that - they're going to Pigfarts.

And he isn't going to play the Gatsby to her stunningly miscast Daisy. He doesn't seem to do well by way of angst, and he'll be damned if she's going to contribute to any such drama in his adult life.

He's had his share, after all, enough for several lifetimes over, and really, he's made his amends, hasn't he? Consider his conscience cleared (and would the vocal little voice in his head sod off, please?)

* * *

Hermione feels marvellous. The rain has stopped, and Ron found her keys down the back of his headboard. She strides out with such positive energy that even the slush in the street seems to move out of her way.

It's the usual routine - coffee, Danish, three different newspapers from the kiosk near work - and she avoids the train out of forced habit.

Things with Ron are good - very good, if the numerous items of clothing she's misplaced at his house are anything to judge by. And oh, they are.

(She doesn't like - or appreciate - the word 'overcompensation'. It reeks too much of guilt and duplicity.)

Home is good, work is good, life - not to put too fine a point on it - is good. The only things that seem to be failing her are her synonyms.

Oh, and it's not like things are bottling up now. She's fine. In fact, she _enjoys_ not having anyone to talk to, because it forces her to at least try with Ron and Harry and Ginny. And yes, there are arguments when they don't understand, and she sometimes lets a wisp of an 'if only' slip by, but essentially, it's better this way.

(And she's increased her hours at work because she's motivated, that's all.)

Nothing suspicious, nothing out of the ordinary.

* * *

(She thinks she's going clinically insane. The next person who so much as speaks to her is going to get a healthy serving of pent-up rage.

And also, just an afterthought? She kind of misses him.)

* * *

It gets normal again for him, faster than expected. He stops thinking about her, almost forgets about that conversation in a coffee shop and how they had looked into the polished window, her hand on his.

He meets someone - and he didn't seek her out just because she's got a name from a Shakespeare play. They get along well, and she kind of has the wordsmith thing down, and they go out to dinner and have a lot of voracious sex for a few weeks, and then she's back to being Cordelia-from-Accounting who'll rip off his tie with her teeth if they're stuck in an elevator together.

He finds that really, guilt doesn't have to plague you every second of the day, unless you let it. He compartmentalises, and somehow he only finds himself feeling like a terrible human being once or twice a week.

(And he studiously avoids the train schedule in his daily newspaper. There's only so much he can deal with at any one time.)

Once in a while, he sees brown hair on a street corner that looks familiar (but no longer quite so distinguishable as it had once been).

He doesn't sigh or moan - he's moved on (_back_) to something more normal. Wasn't that what he had craved, up until a few weeks ago?

If anything, life is better than it used to be, because there's now a warm ball of (vomit? shame?) satisfaction and clear conscience in the pit of his stomach.

And whenever he thinks of her and how badly things ended, Cordelia-from-Accounting is only too happy to take his mind off it all.

* * *

Things are less marvellous.

Suddenly, it's a Tuesday, and she's had a shitty day at work and Ron's gingerly introduced the concept of taking things one step further, and as she kneads her knuckles into her temple she realises that there's a possible solution to all this.

She kind of wants that warm, solid feeling back, but mostly she's calling for purely practical reasons.

"You've reached Draco- oh- Hermione?"

About five different feelings rush through her as her mind makes the cognitive link that he's already saved her number into his phone, recognises the caller ID. Most predominately, she feels a little woozy, but she manages to choke it (with a solid helping of her pride) down as she stutters out, "Could we have coffee?"

He's startled to hear her voice. He had gone for seven years without hearing it once, and suddenly he can't last more than a few days without starting every time the phone rings. It isn't as though they're now cosmically linked by something deeper than acquaintance - one conversation does not a friendship make - but his fingers twitch towards the phone every now and again, spasming without permission from his mind.

She sounds brusque, but like old pavement: there are always a few cracks. It's too easy for him to notice, even in only two words.

He isn't quite sure how to properly convey whichever those feelings stopping his words are - he's not used to feeling so many, really - and so he simply says, "Ten minutes?"

"I'll meet you."

In that coffee shop, things are the same. They don't banter, or even bother overly with small talk, because they both know that there's one reason they're together.

They aren't friends. They just have this cathartic influence on one another that works insidious hooks into every crevasse of their minds, until they're left content and calm.

"Look, it's not as though I like you, or anything-"

It's a vaguely hurtful preface, but he understands where she's coming from.

His face remains stone as she speaks; she's watching closely as though her aim in the first place had been to get a reaction.

"It's just that... nobody else really understands." And so, it pours out, the trivialities of her work day that she's blown to monumental proportions in her head, and it translates as she speaks, it really does. He understands why she's so frustrated with the girl at the front desk, and that she can't get through a day without being questioned on her relationship with Ron.

He does his best not to comment - if she wanted an opinion, she would have called someone who possessed one. He relaxes his facial muscles and watches her closely as she speaks, hoping that he's projecting a smooth, open expression.

To her eyes, he's still blank and hard, as she pours out as much petty bitchiness as she contains within her boiled little heart, and feels herself turning to gooey, soft marshmallow.

_Who'spuregranitenow?_

"Stop it," she finally snaps, and he bumps his cup against the saucer in surprise. Coffee spills over the edge and rapidly soaks the tip of his tie, but she doesn't appear to notice.

To tell the truth, neither does he. He's too busy paying close and unwavering attention to the look on her face and the string of biting words falling from her mouth.

"You can't do that! You can't just _not_ respond. God knows the only reason I speak to you after everything you've done is because something, some strange, messed up thing, clicks with you and I-"

He interrupts, and tries not to sound as foolish as he feels, with, "Oh, _thanks_-"

"But this is not going to work if we can't talk properly! Frankly, there's nobody on the planet I'd _least_ prefer to have this with, but it's undeniable that even with all the crappy, awful things you've done, there's something between us-"

The lines between his eyebrows relax, in pure acceptance-

_-internalexultation-_

-at the fact that she had admitted to the inexplicably sizzling connection between them. That she had noticed the way they had looked in the reflection of the café window - the way they looked _now_ - and how it had felt to be holding hands and letting everything pour out. She had confessed to feeling it, too, on a higher plane than 'it felt good to talk'.

(And could he pretend that he hadn't added the words 'maybe more than friends' onto the thought of her so many times that it flowed naturally, now?)

"-an understanding, because we've both been through a lot and somehow, there's overlap."

She can't not notice the way his face falls, ever so slightly, although he's begging gravity to defy itself for a moment and just _keep holding on_.

"...Are you all right?"

He's not a boy anymore. He isn't one to cower in a corner or poke fun from afar. He may not be quite a man, but it's enough for him to take control, this once. He grabs both of her wrists from where they had stretched cautiously across the table, and he stares at her. "Hermione. I was listening to you. And I understand what you're talking about and I'd like to propose something to you."

She's a bit shell shocked, but not so far gone that she can't mutely nod her head.

"I'd like for us not to be enemies," he continues, and the imprints around her wrists where his fingers had dug in fade and chill as the cool air touches them. "We don't have to be friends - as a matter of fact, that would probably be a terrible idea. But - I'll be around. To talk."

"I would... like that also."

"So it's settled."

"Yes. I suppose it is."

She thinks he might like the pancakes at the place around the corner from her flat.


	5. Chapter 5

It's a Friday morning, only days later, and he's balancing a cardboard tray of coffees on the palm of one hand as he tries desperately to realign the speaker of his phone with his ear after that dastardly pothole incident. His right sleeve is damp, boiling hot, and adhering handily to his skin what with it melting off his bones and all.

He spares only the briefest bitter thought, between curse word and obsequious remark on the phone, to think that once upon a time, he had been the one snickering at the coffee-stained moron who was eager enough to agree to do the morning coffee run.

He grits his teeth, tries to isolate the staining to that single sleeve, and moves on.

She's on her phone, too, but it's a purely social call and Ron's using a combination of pet names and blunt humour that generally makes her want to put her head through a wall. She's gritting her teeth, too, because she was in such a good mood until Ron had called wanting to know what was going on with her and Ginny.

She's tempted to crackle tin foil and pretend they're breaking up. The conversation, that is.

She doesn't.

In the end, though, the seepage of hot coffee into various crevices in the phone's structure seems to do the trick, but she forgets about the phone call the moment she realises who she's just tripped over.

"Hey!" And his voice is a little too squeaky, and they've both clasped onto each other's elbows somewhere between the tripping and the greeting.

She lets go, but his hands slip to her wrist to steady her as she takes a disoriented step backwards.

"Of all the street corners in all the world, Hermione Granger."

"You're soaked; what's happened to you?"

Her single cup of coffee has survived the fall, while his is currently working its way into the pavement and dissolving the mangled cardboard tray into a delightful paste. They pay it no attention - and for once, the emphatically anti-littering side of Hermione's brain stays quiet - and instead automatically hover towards the side of the street.

"Oh, you know - couldn't think of anything better to do, so..."

It's like magic - and the irony is by no means lost on him - when her hand whips out of her bag, full of white napkins, and presses against his upper arm.

(He wishes he had had the aim to spill down his front, instead.)

"Well. Long time, no see, and so forth." It feels achingly apparent, to be babbling on while she's blotting coffee from his upper body. They're too close for comfort, but as always, she appears oblivious of any purpose this might seem to have (to anyone else) other than to determinedly clean him off.

He isn't six anymore, and he's well equipped to wring out his own shirt, but he appreciates it all the same, and lets her steer him towards a bench.

She considers how lucky they were that it had just been vacated by a hefty couple, or her only other option would have been to prop him against the side of a building as she continued, and she knows how that would have looked to the general public.

And it turns out she's well aware of that sort of thing, after all.

The conversation trips over a few light, frothy subjects as he sits uncomfortably and she sits with half of her body over his in order to inspect the inflamed skin on his arm. His head, now that you mention it, feels light and frothy, as though without sufficient anchorage it might float away.

(Hopefully, it would take the florid blushing with it. Even so, though - blood appears to flow to several other places on his body.)

"How's Ronald?" he chokes out, and she wonders why his face is screwed up like that.

"He's... fine." She wills herself not to pause between the words, to keep the sentence whole and cheerful, rather than fractured and dubious.

She isn't upset with him. It's just that sometimes, he chooses entirely the wrong conversation to pursue.

He contemplates her response - and he's noticed the way she paused, as though it had flashed on a billboard above her head - and then asks gingerly, "Not so good, then?"

She scoffs, with a sort of spitting denial thrown in, and then her bunched up facial features fall and she answers, "That about sums it up."

"We could talk," he offers. "I hear I'm a fabulous listener, nowadays."

She smiles, in spite of herself, and then notes the time. "Weren't you in the middle of something? A job, to be specific."

He twists her wrist gently, to look at the time once he connected her comment with her glance.

(He's wearing a watch too. The fact has just escaped him, briefly.)

She disappears, but he knows that she hasn't used magic because he can see the back of her expensive coat up ahead by the coffee kiosk. He tries to stand up, considers going after her, but then realises that if he goes on a wild goose chase for a woman with a terrible habit of running away from him, he's going to be in an even bigger pile of dragon dung when he returns to the office.

She reappears beside him with a fresh tray of coffees, before the thought has even processed, and then yanks him behind a building by his tie. She cuts off his exclamations, and manages to perfectly balance the coffees as she prods his shirt with a wand that had materialised from somewhere sneaky within her coat lining.

_Why hadn't he thought of that?_ The thought is fleeting, though, because he has the good grace to accept that she's always been much faster on her feet than he is.

It sizzles, almost stinging against his chest, and his shirt is pristine and white and dry, and she's got both hands planted in the small of his back to give him a strong push in the direction of the office.

"Thank you," he says, turning around, and she waves a hand and gestures him off.

She's already glanced away, but she hears his words: "I'll make it up to you." They induce a smile, and she meets his eyes before she dries her phone with magic and then slips out of the alleyway to continue on her way to work.

* * *

And before he knows it, the weekend has loomed ahead once again. On his first morning off in a month, he spends almost an hour agonising by the phone in his apartment before it finds its way into his hand.

He cradles it, and then passes it from palm to palm. He isn't wasting time - that would be counter-productive, and he's nothing if not a worker bee, nowadays. He's been contemplative and- honestly, he can't begin to fathom the words he'd need to speak to Hermione. The first time, there had been a purpose, an important aim, and running into her (literally) had been pure chance. He didn't know how to ask to 'hang out'. He didn't 'hang out' with anyone - people were divided into colleagues, acquaintances from the past or present, and family. Pansy still calls him now and again, and he met Blaise for a pint the previous Christmas, but he doesn't make a habit of keeping in touch with people. Most shun him like the plague, so it isn't as though he has much opportunity.

He fiddles quite deliberately with the cracked cord of the phone. He's too old for this, to be twirling it around his fingers like a thirteen year old girl, plucking up the courage to call someone. He's too old to care what she thinks of him.

(After all, he already knows.)

The crumpled sticky note with her phone number written neatly across the top had been taped in the top corner of his mirror, but he's worn the creases out with the palms of his hands and it's sitting on his knee, now, looking the most innocuous slip of paper in the existence of mankind. He had initially logged it into the contact list on his phone, but felt so pretentious ('this is Hermione Granger, we're _friends_') that he had deleted it.

(And it's not as though he knows it by heart, or anything.)

He decides to leave a message. He can plan his words, then - indeed, a skeletal framework has formed on the edge of his mind - and be as casual and aloof as he likes. Somehow, speaking directly to her make him honest.

(It's a feeling he doesn't quite relish, but one he can appreciate, nonetheless.)

"This is Hermione Granger. Please leave your name and number and I'll return your call at the earliest possible conve-"

He's taken a breath to expel the collected spiel he's prepared, but her breathless voice cuts in on the computerised one. "Hello?"

Oh. Shit.

"Er, hi, Hermione," he gasps out - and it shouldn't be so awkward, but they're still not really friends (let alone anything more; soft_soft_ skin) and he feels terrible uncomfortable. "How are you going?"

"I'm well - rushed, but well. How are you, Draco?"

He hasn't missed the tone in her voice, as though she's exerting some sort of great physical effort as she speaks. So, rather than answering her question, he asks another of his own. "What are you doing? Running?"

"There's another dragon in the lobby. We almost had it by the entrance, but it changed tack and decided to befoul the fountain again. Don't worry, though." The background noise fades and a door clicks shut. "The rest of them can deal with it."

He's no stranger to dragons, and can't help but protest her cavalier attitude. "A dragon. There's a dragon in the lobby of the Ministry of Magic and you're taking phone calls?"

"It's only a baby - the worst it can do is to give out a few scorch marks, and Lord knows there are some people here who need a bit of a scathing. So, what's new with you?"

"Oh, nothing quite so interesting as that - weekend off, the same old story." He finds his index finger creeping back towards the phone cord. "I was wondering, actually, if you might like to have coffee?"

"I'm sorry, I'm going to be working quite late today."

His face falls, but he keeps his voice carefully composed as he forms a forced sentence. "Oh, that's all right - just a thought, you know."

She hears his tone. It would be simple, so devastatingly easy to brush him off and shove him under the carpet. She hears the voice, though, and how it's deepened and matured and cracks a little sometimes in an entirely un-squeaky way when he's emotional.

"Tomorrow, though? I've got it off."

They make a plan. It's as simple as that. Friendship isn't built in a day, but he's working on it, he swears. It's getting easier to act like this around one another.

(Secretly, they both know, it isn't acting, and really, isn't that the point?)

* * *

The next morning, they have pancakes at that place near her flat, and they don't actually speak about Hogwarts or the way things used to be. There's the greeting, and the small talk, but it fluidly transitions into quiet laughter and very-almost-friendly jokes. They've somehow missed the awkward pause and the meaningful question and the devolvement into intense, brooding conversation.

(-holding hands across the table-)

She really quite enjoys herself.

He really likes the pancakes, thinks that he could get used to this.

She catches their reflection in the window, this time, and they aren't touching or even close, but they're sitting opposite one another in a booth and looking adult and mature as they speak. The image seems innocent enough, but that evening she feels a pang of inexplicable guilt and spends the night with Ron again.

They don't speak the next day, but there's just enough for a pause whenever she sees the post-it taped to the inside of her top drawer for her to fill with a sort of contented feeling, as though there's nothing to worry about, or to feel guilty for. It's pleasant.

She considers going to Ron's that night, to smooth things over after another repetition of _that_ conversation the night before, but it's been a long day and she needs to shower with her own body wash. She calls him, though - _him, _Ron, not _him, him_. He's still at work; he starts and finishes later than she does because _Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes_ does its best trade later in the day and he takes an Auror course in the early evening, but she leaves a careful voice message with just a hint of purposeful innuendo, and then starts to make a batch of pasta sauce.

(And again, with the overcompensation? She's certain there's another word for this.)

Ron arrives, dripping wet because he had Apparated onto the street instead of into her flat, and he's grumpy and cranky until he takes a whiff of the warm air. "Is that... oregano, that I smell?" he asks, nose still poked into the air and nostrils flaring as he inhales.

"I believe it is," she says from the stove, and he's unknotting her apron and hugging her from behind before she has a chance to protest. She lets him brush her hair back from her neck and kiss that spot on her jaw line while she carefullycarefully-ohgod-_carefully_ turns down the flame so that the sauce can simmer while their temperatures rise.

(She's remembered the word, in case you're interested. She -_loves-_ him.)

They're kissing, and she's murmuring into his ear about how unsanitary it is to even _consider_ doing this in a kitchen, when her phone rings shrilly from her abandoned handbag. He grimaces, and, like he always does, mutters something encouraging about letting it go to voicemail, but she's already steering him back into the living room.

She thinks it might be Draco, and oh, if only he knew that he was interrupting the know-it-all getting hot and heavy against the refrigerator-

"Hello?" Her breath is coming too fast, too heavy. She works to stifle it, wincing at the reaction it's going to get. He isn't so mature now that he'll let a perfectly good innuendo slip by, let alone an honest-to-goodness _situation_, and she waits for whichever witty comment he'll choose to sling at her by way of greeting.

"Hermione-" The voice is female and thick and tinged with tears. "I'm so sorry-"

She's taken off guard; her fight with Ginny had been so long ago. She didn't want to admit it (because she was supposed to be the good friend, the reliable one) but she hadn't given Ginny a second thought since walking out her front door, hanging the phone up on her angry voice. Even now, with Ginny wailing on the phone and Ron's strong hands on her hips, thumb ghosting over a bare patch of skin where her shirt's ridden up, she's thinking about entirely different things. She mouths, 'your sister' at Ron's questioning face, and listens for a moment until it gets to be entirely too much.

"Ginny," she snaps, and her tone is sharp enough that Ron removes his lips from her skin with his eyebrows hovering around his hairline, and Ginny shuts up with a shocked hiccup. "Ginny. You didn't offend me; we're fine; I'm kind of in the middle of something so would you mind if I called you back later?"

What had she said about no longer coddling people? She feels as though perhaps she's taken it a step too far, because Ron's still staring at her and all she can hear over her own heavy breathing is Ginny sobbing in the background.

Harry comes on the line, just as she's about to hang up and try to sort out this thing with Ron.

"What have you done?" he demands, and she can tell he's upset and weary and not as angry as he's trying to come across. "Don't you understand what she's like right now?"

"Harry-"

"And what's this crap about Malfoy? You and I are going to have a conversation, Hermione-"

The room seems to shrink in on her, and she forgets about Ron with his rough hands on her waist and she forgets about Harry squawking some nonsense on the other end of the phone, and in one of those moments of clarity that seem to be increasing in frequency, _she has to get away from them all._

She doesn't want to have to explain that Ginny's driving her insane right now and that if he weren't blinded by love or tiredness or whatever, he would see it, too.

She _really_ doesn't want to have to deal with Ron's overprotective brother act - and it still comes out, sometimes, because all best friends have disagreements but his concern for Ginny is constant.

"Here." Blindly, she shoves the phone into Ron's cupped hand - he had been about to touch her cheek, and he seems a little hurt at the rebuff. She grabs her coat and her keys and remembers to turn off the gas on the stove before she leaves the apartment.

* * *

Draco's sitting in his favourite armchair with a ball of blue fire burning in a salad bowl on the coffee table. There's a pen between his lips, and he's trying to decide whether to procrastinate or to get his ass in gear and do some work. The points for each side are fairly even; he decides that it's not the time to be thinking about this, and he'll decide later.

He's procrastinating procrastination. Don't worry - he astounds himself, as well.

The phone rings and there're a few moments of quiet breathing and vague chatting before it's all coming out in a rush, and somewhere in the midst of it all he hears her ask, "Can you meet me?"

He meets her on a street corner, because it feels a little soon and a little seedy to invite her back to his apartment after only days of 'hanging out'. She's frustrated, pacing back and forth with her fists bunched stiffly by her sides, when he gets there.

"Hey."

"Hi."

"How are we, tonight?"

"You sound like a moron," she says, just a few inches away from snarling. Her fists are clenched in her pockets, and she isn't sure why he's aggravating her so much. For just a moment, it swells, but she deflates just as quickly and she's collapsing wearily onto a park bench. "God, I'm sorry, I'm just-"

He holds up a finger and walks away, and she stares after him, a little bewildered. She wasn't prone to these fits of... sub psychotic rage, but Ginny's voice still grates in her mind, and Harry's, and the way Ron had stared at her, and Draco was the nearest defenceless target.

She understands, a little, the way he must have felt during school - Harry and Ron could (and would) have pummelled him, the scrawny little thing he had been most of their Hogwarts careers, and she had been the nearest option for him to take his issues out on.

That doesn't make it all right, mind you - they've been speaking on civil terms for only days; bygones are hardly about to be bygones.

But then, he comes back with a paper cup of coffee in each hand and she smells cinnamon.

(He's not sure how he knows the way she likes her coffee; she had ordered it black at the café.)

She accepts it, though, and they make faces at one another - hers are apologetic, his are designed to entertain - until she bursts out laughing and inhales hot coffee up her nose.

It isn't her most glamorous moment, nor is his cackling, bent over double, but eventually she straightens out and he straightens up, and they start to talk.

"I'm not sure why I called you," she began - because they have to make it clear, that they aren't friends, that they're a sort of last resort. She punctuates her sentence with a sip, because she wants to leave a gaping opportunity for him to clarify their relationship: 'We're friends; that's what friends do', or, 'I'm always here to listen; we're civil now, after all'.

He doesn't. He balances the plastic lid on his lap and blows on his coffee, staring dolefully at the toe of his shoe and waiting for her to continue.

"Things were just getting a bit- emotional, back at the apartment."

"Ron, again?" he inquires lightly, without looking at her.

She's impressed that he swallows whichever following insults had been on the tip of his tongue, and that he manages to end on a high note as though that had been his original intention.

He's getting better at this; he used to sound like a pubescent boy when he had to bite his tongue mid-sentence.

"His sister. And Harry. They're about to have a baby; she's driving me slightly insane."

He shudders, but she isn't surprised. She's not really a fan of children, either - they do the most ghastly things with jam and with the corners of pages - and she can't imagine him lovingly patting a small one, either.

He's shuddering more at the idea of Potter procreating at all, let alone carrying on the ginger gene with the female Weasley, but he holds it in.

"So," he prods gently, and emphasises his point with one finger against her coat sleeve. "Tell me about it, if you like."

She breathes out, relieved, and tries to explain in terms he would understand. She doesn't want to go into the Ron issue, so she skates around it and focuses on Ginny's nagging.

-Somehow, he gets it out of her anyway, and she can't quite voice the feeling but she thinks he understands anyway.

He pays close attention to the way she looks when she speaks, to the red across her cheeks and the way the wind blows her hair into her mouth and how she glares at it before yanking it away. It fascinates him, a little, and he hates to admit it but he finds it strangely compelling, how animated she's getting.

Compelling in a tightened trousers, red in the face sort of way. He's more than a little uncomfortable, and it worsens as they speak.

She's leaving, with hair and scarf billowing and a slight smile stealing across her mouth. He calls after her, and the word's almost lost on the wind.

She turns around, curious and impatient.

"I'm glad that you called, you know."

She doesn't really need him to clarify their relationship at all. It's kind of enough.


	6. Chapter 6

It's late by the time she slips back into the apartment, and the smell of tomato and oregano has faded, replaced by stony silence. Ron's still there, though - she can hear his familiar muttering breaths in the next room.

She returns her coat to the stand, and her keys from the bowl by the door, and kicks off her shoes to pad into her bedroom. He's curled at one end, on top of the blankets, with his shoulders hunched over and his knees bent. Even in sleep, he's frowning.

She uses the pad of her thumb to straighten out the creased skin, the way he does to her whenever she's upset about something.

It seems apparent that to shift him into a normal sleeping position would be a futile effort - he's twice her size, after all - so she curls beside him, perpendicular to the bed, with her knees tucked into the back of his and her front pressing against his rounded spine.

It sort of fits. She sort of drifts off, thinking about him and about _him_.

Two blocks away, he isn't asleep. He's at his desk, with a blanket draped over his lap and a pot of coffee by his side, with a pen pressing an inflamed lump into the side of his finger from writing so furiously.

The window is open, an inch-thick crack that's just enough to let the cold air in. He's still in his shirtsleeves, still wide awake with his eyes blurring from focusing as hard as he is.

He's trying to capture her smile, her laugh, the way she grimaces at the invading wind.

It sort of works. He lets his imagination wander; the dialogue flows easily, the description is surprisingly decent-

(It's all in the parentheses, though. That's where it really happens.)

The pages pile in the left hand corner of his desk.

When his hand cramps, he dictates to a quill, but the life drains out of it all so quickly that he takes to performing finger exercises, instead.

Dawn arrives, and it's too easy to put it in his desk drawer and push it to the back of his mind. Somehow, though, he leaves the house wearing a red and gold tie, and without realising, he orders his coffee with cinnamon.

* * *

When the grey light fades away and is replaced by irritatingly beautiful sunshine, she's been awake and observant for hours. She's almost tempted to prod at his still cheek with one finger - George has few rules but lateness is strictly forbidden at Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes - but he's already stirring.

"Good morning." Her whisper comes hesitantly - she isn't sure who's supposed to be upset, this time around, and she figures playing it safe is the best way to go.

He starts, and then brushes his hand through the top of her hair. "We're alright, aren't we, Hermione? Please?"

(Somehow, during the night, they had ended up wrapped in each other's arms. She doesn't have to move to meet his eyes.)

"Of course we are, Ron."

They make out for a while, and it's nice, but it's nowhere near boiling over into anything serious and she's painstakingly careful about morning quickies. In the end, they roll apart, both laughing a little breathlessly, and she showers while he brews the coffee pot.

(And it wouldn't be so bad to live together, would it?)

He mentions home, a change of clothes, a file left in his bedroom. She's a little wistful to see him go (and hey, she could maybe get used to this).

The kettle boils just as her phone jangles, and thank goodness Ron had just left because when she misses it by half a second, Draco's voice bursts from the speaker.

"Hello, Hermione, just wanted to make sure you're right after last night - and, well, I've got something I'd like to speak to you about. Can we meet? Telephone at your leisure."

She stands there for a moment, with a towel wrapped around her torso and another around her wet hair. There's a small puddle growing around her feet, but she barely notices but for the vague register of something damp as she steps closer to the phone. She's apprehensive, because they left things well the night before but he sounds serious, now.

If this is the part in the movie where the popular, gorgeous boy dumps pig's blood on the unpopular, dull girl - she doesn't want to star, anymore. She wants a supporting role, perhaps, and she'd be all right with scraping the fake goo off the female lead take after take, just as long as she isn't the one crying at the end of it all. As it turns out, she's grown a bit attached to him, and other such nonsense.

He's changed, though - he's more likely to be the heroic, stupid one who bursts in and doesn't follow the script and does his damnedest to make everything better.

The thought is enough for her to smile (a little too thin) and pick up the phone (with her hand shaking, just a bit) and dial his number (with her heart beating too loud in her ears).

"Draco? It's me. Sorry - I just missed your call."

"I suppose it's within me to forgive you," he says, with his voice bright and cheerful and the smile beaming through the telephone.

He's glad she called.

So is she.

* * *

"I'm not going to invite you in," she warns him, hovering with her keys at the bottom of the steps to her building.

He lifts two defensive hands and pulls a face. "As though I'd deign to enter your place of habitude. That isn't how I roll, Hermione."

She smiles, and the key ring slips from her finger to within the depths of the bag. She's forgotten about it, about the prospect of entering the apartment, about ending their conversation. They were working their way through the past seven years - they had a lot to catch up on. And it had turned out that all he wanted to speak about was whether she thought the coffee at this place was better than that at the café. And it's still a bit stilted, and they still alternate between uncomfortably soft and _thatsamegranite_, but they speak for almost another hour, leaning on the steps outside her apartment building.

* * *

His manuscript, so prolific and expansive at first, is shrinking rapidly. He doesn't write more, doesn't continue from the chapters of imaginary interactions, but instead edits them ferociously, without mercy. He takes no prisoners, when it comes to his own work, and several hefty chunks make their way into his garbage bin for no reason other than he was bored of them.

(He removes them from the bin later and bundles them in tape, shoves them in a drawer. The reasons escape him, but he's certain that those pages of scrawled handwriting aren't supposed to perish.)

Soon, there is only a thin folder on his desk, and his bottom desk drawers are brimming with dog-eared, tattered pieces of paper. A sentence, a paragraph only might adorn them, but he shoves them away all the same. They might not fit into the plotless story with the thinly-veiled character names, but on reading them, he can't deny it. The girl could be described as blonde, tall, vivacious, stupid - _it was Hermione_, her laugh or a way of phrasing or the air about her.

She's infecting his writing, and he would hate her for it if it wasn't suddenly colourful.

He'd never been much a writer. He had the perseverance, but lacked the method, the special something that he only rarely sees colouring the pages of the manuscripts he reads day in, day out.

Hermione Granger had found his special something. She _was_ his special something. In little more than a month, she had managed to claw her way inside his brain until it was watertight with _her_.

He doesn't like it. He isn't supposed to like her (even in the purely platonic sense that is the only way he thinks of her-).

(Honestly.)

_(He wouldn't lie to you. The parentheses are supposed to be where he tells the truth.)_

(He thinks he's starting to get a bit silly over Hermione Granger.)

_(There. Honesty. How overrated.)_

The funny thing is, he's angry at his younger self, because Hermione Granger has turned out to be someone he actually enjoys spending time with. He isn't sure whether it's a new facet of her personality, or whether she's always been like this, but she's actually got a sense of humour. It differs from that of Potter and Weasley - not confined to fart jokes and 'that's what she said', that is. And really, she doesn't talk about books all that often.

(Every second sentence.)

He doesn't mind, though.

* * *

There's an awkward conversation with Ron, weeks later, somewhere after "yes, Draco was actually saying yesterday that-" and the overwhelming horror that overtakes her when Ron registers her words.

"_Draco_? Correct me if I'm wrong, Hermione, but I'm fairly sure you only know _one_ poncy, snub-nosed scumbag by that name."

"Malfoy," she clarifies slowly, laying her fork on the side of her plate. Her mind spins frantically, scrambling with sticky tendrils to latch onto a feasible excuse for any civil communication between the two of them. As usual, her lies flounder to the bottom of her skull, and she spurts out the simple, honest truth. "We're... friends."

"You and Draco Malfoy are friends? The one who called you 'buck tooth' and 'Mudblood' all through our schooling careers. The one who- _he killed my brother, Hermione_-"

She had thought he might take it in better, more mature spirits than this, but the awkward conversation is rapidly transforming into a tearful argument. The mention of Fred stabs at her, and she holds her jaw firm to keep it from quivering. Her teeth grit, and Ron notices.

"Ron, he- we've spoken about this, he and I, and I'm sure he'd be more than happy to come and explain to you-"

"How long has this been going on?" demands Ron, and his fork falls to the table with a clatter. It smears white sauce across the blue tablecloth, and she stares at it while he stares at her.

_I'm going to have to wash that, now,_ she thinks calmly, as Ron evades her stretching hand and throws his chair back.

"I can't believe you, Hermione- there's being forgiving, but this is a step too far."

"It isn't like that - I was furious with him at first, absolutely livid-"

"Yeah? Well, can we please rewind the clock back to that point in time?"

"Ronald, get a grip on yourself. He's changed. He isn't the same person he was at Hogwarts."

"Frankly, Hermione, I couldn't care less, because I don't think I can handle this on top of everything else."

She picks apart his sentence at a phenomenal rate in her head, and falls upon the part most likely to direct the conversation away from Draco. "Everything else?" she queries, and now she's on her feet as well. "What do you mean by that, Ronald?"

He cries, his fingers tearing in his hair, "You won't move in with me; you won't take any steps, no matter how small. We're stuck in a bloody _rut_, Hermione- and now Malfoy's back on the scene? _He killed Fred._"

"Don't do that," she whispers, stretching out towards him even though there's a table between them. "Please-"

"How long?" he forces out, taking a few steps around the table towards her side. "How long has this been going on without you telling me?"

"I don't know, Ron, a week or two- it's beside the point, anyway. We're not even _friends _or anything. I can _talk_ to him. We talk. He understands."

"Oh, I'm sure it's easy for the scumbag to understand you." His snarl frightens her, and she can think of nothing but to get out. "I suppose you two talk about clothes and shopping and nail polish. I'm _sorry_, Hermione, that you feel you can't _talk_ to _me_ about those things. I _apologise_ that I'm not a traitorous bastard who sold everyone out."

"Ron," and she musters up all the strength and energy she possesses, "Ron, I love you, but _get out of my apartment_."

He kisses her, so quickly she doesn't have time to react, and his hands cradle the side of her face for a beat longer and he whispers fiercely, "Please, Hermione- I can't lose you to sodding Malfoy."

"Get out!" she cries again, throwing a hand in the direction of the door.

He leaves without a second glance, his ears flaming red.

She surveys the wreckage of their dinner. The candles have blown out, and wax has spilt across the deep blue cloth. His chair is overturned, hers is shoved back. Her ears still ring with the sound of the slammed door, playing over and over again like a sick broken record.

And the buzzer rings.

* * *

Her voice floods over the intercom, fierce and full of rage. "Ronald, I swear, the only words I want to say to you right now contain four letters, so _go home_-"

"Hermione?"

He has a book she had lent him in his satchel; he had finished it in record time and decided to drop it around on his way home from work.

He had enjoyed it, too, and there were a myriad of whirling comments and ideas in his head that he had been planning to share with her, before he heard her voice.

"Hermione?" he repeats, pressing the button hard with the pad of his thumb. "Are you all right?"

"Draco?" It's a gasping, choking sob, and he barely wrangles the syllables of his name out of it. Really, it's just a guess.

"What happened, Hermione? Speak to me, please."

Uncharacteristic concern. He's supposed to be stifling, remember?

"I'm sorry- I can't see you, now."

He does the only thing it's within his capabilities to do. He runs his finger down every button in the building, and simultaneous clangs as the security door is buzzed open by frustrated tenants sound like music to his ears.

He takes the stairs to her apartment two at a time, and he's glad he paid so much attention to the address on the inner cover of the book or he would be aimlessly wandering the corridors. Instead, though, he's purposeful and pounding at her door, with a warning, "Please don't make me break down the door - I have delicate shoulders."

It opens just as he's about to throw his full force into it, and he isn't sure what he expected. For her to be crying and miserable, perhaps, awaiting his delicate shoulders to cry on. Instead, her feet are planted firmly in the carpet, and she's looking young and vicious and ready to fight. She stares into his eyes, and though he sees no tears, she's upset.

"I told you I didn't want to see you," she says, fighting to keep her voice regulated and normal.

It doesn't work, and he counters, "If we're friends, you're obligated to speak to me about things like this."

"'Friends'." Her fingers make the air quotes and somehow manage to drip poison. She retreats into the apartment, but leaves the door swinging as an obvious invitation. "How can we possibly be 'friends'? I don't know you- or, I do know you, and that's the problem. You're _Draco fucking Malfoy_. We aren't friends. We can't be friends. You're-"

A thick knot, of muscles or horror or real, genuine grief - _crocodile tears, darling, they've played too big a part in this performance_ - forms in his throat.

"I'm-?" he prompts, letting his satchel slip to the ground as he stares at her. There had been a change, a dramatic warp of the way things were the day before, when they had lunch and laughed about a favourite wizard band.

Weasley had something to do with this, he knows, and yet he can't view her words as mere prompted rubbish. They're coming from within her, after all - at a force strong enough to sting wherever they land.

(It feels as though he's been catapulted into a pit of vipers. He doesn't let on.)

"You're _you_," she whispers, and then hurries away from him, pressing herself up against the opposite wall as though she thinks he's going to hurt her.

_What had Weasley done to the girl?_ She looks like her puppy had been shot in front of her, a terrible mixture of so-close-to-tears and horror and rage. She doesn't look like herself.

"Hermione-" He reaches out a hand, takes a few swift strides before she can dive away from him again. "Tell me what happened."

He blinks off her words - 'you're _you_', 'we can't be friends' - and leads her over to the sofa with as much force as he feels safe to exert around her. Her wrists are thin and cold; he's never noticed before.

She lets him drag her to the couch, lets him sit her in the uncomfortable crevasse between two cushions with no intentions whatsoever of speaking to him - because Ron's right, isn't he? But when he looks at her with his eyebrows raised in expectation, and she sees his eyes trained upon her face as though he did this sort of thing often, something inside her breaks and it all spills out.

She tells the story coherently, lacking the fits and starts he expects. His first reaction is of shame. He's horrified (and a little pleased at upsetting Weasley, but _horrified_) that he's the cause of all of this.

The reaction that closely follows is a murderous urge to tear Weasley limb from limb.

"I could hurt him for you," he offers, and seeing something in her eyes, continues. "Honestly, it would be my _pleasure_ to do it. I seem to have a bone to pick with that boy, regardless."

She stifles a wet snort, and says, through eyes that are rubbed red and raw by corrosive tears. "He'd pummel you."

"Probably crush me like a cornflake," he agrees, and the tiny upturn of lips, flash of teeth, is enough for him to readily make a fool of himself for the rest of his life, if only to make her smile at times like these.

He bustles around and boils the kettle, more for something to do than because she actually seemed to need a stimulant. Glancing over to see her pale and staring, though, he shakes a little of the contents of his satchel flask into her cup of tea.

"Here," he offers, and she gives a weak half smile as she takes the mug.

"Thank you, Draco - for everything."

As she sips, he takes in the apartment. It's neat, ordered, with everything from furniture down to knick knacks adhering to a specific colour scheme of warm reds and purples and mahogany wood. There are a few pictures, sparsely spread over the apartment. There's one of her parents, clearly in a place of honour at the front of an end table, flanked by a picture of her and Weasley and another of Potter and Ginny at their wedding.

(He knows, with as much certainty as if he'd seen it, that there would be another picture of the three of them together, the Golden Trio. He's managed to glean how much she values their bond, even if he doesn't quite understand the attraction.)

He's impressed with her housekeeping skills, but the remnants of the night's chaos are evident - the upset chairs, the half-eaten dinner, the crooked pictures on the wall from the slamming door. She sees him looking and tries to clean up, and he lets her - he helps her. He scrapes hardened candle wax from the tablecloth with a knife, while she straightens the picture frames and pays special attention to the black and white print of a beach in France. She soaks the tablecloth and he does the dishes and lets her flick him with the corner of a wet handtowel on the way past.

When she's otherwise occupied, he sneaks into her bedroom to deposit her copy of a Fitzgerald book on the nightstand, and finds the picture he'd predicted, in an ornate, quite lovely frame. He wants to hide it, to turn it face down so that the reminder of Weasley isn't staring her in the face when she awakens. Reluctantly, he places it on top of the book he had set down, because he knows that Weasley is a decent sort of presence in her life.

She offers coffee, but it's already late and he has unfinished work digging a guilty dent into his side through his satchel.

"Hermione," he says at the door, and she grudgingly accepts that he's entitled to a bit of advice-giving after the help he's given her. "Let him apologise, all right? You know how it's got to go."

She does know. She knows that while she's fully capable of holding a grudge, she won't stay angry with him for long, and that she won't apologise for forgiving Draco but that he'll plead mercy for being an indomitable ass and she'll forgive him readily. Because, in the end, she can't stand to see his broad shoulders droop and for the smile to slide off his face because of her, and though it's hardly perfect justification for moving through the crap he does sometimes, it's quite enough of a catalyst to mend their relationship.

She looks up to thank Draco, for taking such an invested interest in a relationship he's quite probably disgusted by, but he's long gone. She finds the book he'd brought under the picture on her nightstand, and she stares at their three faces, identically ridden with silly grins. She's in the middle, with Harry's arm around her shoulders and Ron's firmly around his waist.

It's obvious, really, what she has to do.


	7. Chapter 7

She hugs him tightly, both arms squeezing around his neck, and it feels as though it's been _months_, it really does.

"Fancy seeing you here," he says, his smile wide, and he hugs her firmly around the middle. He stopped growing years ago, but every time she sees him it's as though he's gotten taller, broader. She doesn't see him often enough to be able to trace his figure out in her sleep, like she can with Ron, but she fits comfortably into his chest all the same.

"How's Ginny?" she asks, out of politeness, as they sit down.

He rubs the heel of his hand at a pre-mussed spot of black hair, and shrugs his shoulders the way he did when he was fourteen. "You know, as you'd expect. Sarcastic, a bit moody, complaining as though it's my fault."

Harry's been through too much to bother with lying for the sake of politeness, and he's honest in a blatant kind of way. He's one of the most open people she knows, and she appreciates the crispness - it comes in handy, when she has a dilemma about Ron.

"It kind of _is_," she reminds him with a smile, and he raises his water glass in deference to her supreme knowledge. "Often?" she asks, and it's with sympathy because he looks as though he's missed out on a year of sleep.

"Oh, just on days that end in 'y'," he answers, but it's light-hearted and he's quick to change the topic. "So, Hermione. Shall we get to the point?"

Once again, as they always do, her lies and stalling fail her, and she nods. "It's about Ron."

"Oh, I don't know - it's really Malfoy at the root of it all, isn't it?"

She glares at him, and continues. "We had a fight."

"I assumed as much, judging by his appearance at our place last night. He seemed rather unhappy."

"Of course," she mutters, but she isn't surprised. She doesn't blame him for going to his best friend when he has relationship issues, but if she knows Ron, he will have ranted and raved and then planned an intervention for her.

"He's concerned," Harry comments, and he orders a plate of raisin toast from a waitress who ogles him as she walks past. He seems utterly indifferent - and that was the thing about Harry; he was utterly, completely faithful, without even noticing. He continues, with a vaguely disapproving tone in his voice, "He's upset that you didn't tell him."

"Well, judging by how he reacted last night-"

"I know, Hermione - I'm just saying, he's not without reason."

"You agree with him?"

"I think it'd probably be wise for you to tell me what you're doing talking to Malfoy first."

She relates the story, emphasises how she hated him at first, how hard he had worked for it all, how much he's changed. She tells him about the night before, and she knows that the idea of Draco washing dishes has impressed the change he's undergone upon Harry, because his black eyebrows raise high up his face and his glasses almost slip off his nose.

At the end, she waits, plaintively, and Harry bites at a corner of his toast and licks his thumb for sugar. He nods to himself as he processes, and she _sees_ that he understands. He doesn't like it, and he still thinks Ron is right, but over the years, Harry's had to play mediator in hundreds of conflicts and he always plays it with one foot firmly in each side. He seems to pity Draco, a bit, and the thought consoles her, because if Harry, who had lost so much because of those seventeen years, can forgive him, anyone can, with time.

"I think," he says, swallowing and wiping his hands on his napkin, "that you ought to call Ron. Even if you don't feel you need to apologise, you two have to talk about this, and despite what you might think, he's keen to listen."

"Oh, really?" she scoffs, remembering him knocking back his chair, storming out-

-and the way he had kissed her, and whispered in her ear.

"Really?" she says again, but this time it's soft, if disbelieving.

"Would I lie to you?" he says sternly, staring at her over his glasses in a way startlingly reminiscent of Professor Dumbledore.

"No?" she says hesitantly, and it's the right answer, she's fairly certain. Fairly certain- she's Hermione Granger. She gets things right. "Riddle me this, then, Harry." She puts her chin in her hands. "Why is he so upset?"

"Why is he- you're kidding, surely? Hermione, I thought you were the one who was good at reading people. Ron's the one with the 'emotional range the size of a teaspoon', remember?"

She raises her eyebrows; he continues.

"He's always hated Malfoy, because he's everything Ron's ever wanted to be- just, in a snivelling, snot-nosed ferrety package."

"Harry!" She slaps him on the forearm, and he grins playfully at her, because it's been a while since she could actually hurt him like that.

"He's already insecure about your relationship because of, oh, I don't know- that thing where you won't move in with the man? He thinks maybe there's something wrong with him, that perhaps he's going to lose you soon and you won't set down roots because you know you won't be around for long."

She's considered this; she's gone over every word in her head a million times. It makes her guilty - it always does - but the fact remains that whenever the subject is breached she finds herself instinctively saying, 'Ron, I think we should be taking things slowly, glacial even. We're still young. We've got plenty of time.'

Hearing it from Harry's mouth - and it isn't as though this is the first time, either - makes it more real, makes her more guilt-ridden.

"Enter Draco Malfoy, childhood nemesis and all round harbinger of evil. He finds out that you two have gotten... close." One of his eyebrows rises up his forehead; she isn't going to pretend she hasn't noticed. She's got nothing to be ashamed of. "And suddenly, the panic kicks in. 'Is this the reason she won't take any steps with me? Is Malfoy the thing that's holding her back from what should, logically, be a lifetime of marital felicity? Could Malfoy be trying to steal my beloved girlfriend of seven years away from me?'"

"Oh, shove your condescension back where it came from, Harry- I understand _that_, but surely there's a _sliver_ of logic in his mind that promptly tells him he's bat shit insane?"

"Logic there may be, but whether that's what it would say..."

She hates it when he gets cryptic. It makes her want to shatter his glasses and push them back into his face - and it's a good thing for him that he's taken to wearing contacts a lot of the time.

"Frankly, I'm not sure he's without warrant to be concerned," Harry finally admits, and then takes a ginger sip of his cup of coffee with his little finger subconsciously extended.

Apparently, Harry's left foot is itching over into enemy territory. She's incredulous, and disappointed, and-

"You think I'm in love with _Malfoy_?"

He sits back in his seat, grinning at her as she corrects herself. "Draco, I mean- you think I'm in love with Draco?"

"I think that you two're close, and it's as though he's a new person- who does _washing up_." His nose wrinkles in distaste, and he doesn't appear to notice the way her hands have snapped to her hips. "Perhaps you can't help it. It might just... happen."

"Harry, I assure you, _I'm_ in full control of myself, physically and mentally. I _love_ Ron. There's no way I'm going to sacrifice all that, all of those years, out of a _nonexistent _longing for Draco Malfoy."

"I'm glad to hear you say so, but if it were any guy at all, I'd expect Ron to be concerned. He's not out of line here, Hermione."

"But you think I am?"

"I think..." He looks so wise, sitting there with a frothed milk moustache and twiddling his thumbs over his crumby plate. She almost wonders why she comes to him for advice about anything at all, until he opens his mouth and advises her, always so practical: "I think you're in danger of getting in over your head with Malfoy, but if you stay rational and weigh the odds... you're smart, Hermione- just, don't push Ron too hard. He can't really take it at this point."

She doesn't like to think that what he's saying holds any weight at all - specifically, the parts about possibly someday maybe loving Draco - but he's so honest and has that way about him, that 'I know this is unpleasant to hear but it's for your own good that I'm telling you this' air.

She orders eggs, and then, to clarify, asks, "So, you think I should... call Ronald."

"By no means. He'll find you. Perhaps you both need a few days, anyway. It has been about fourteen years, after all. Are you going to eat that?"

* * *

Some days, the thought of his reformed, saintly self brings giddy warmth into the pit of his stomach. Sometimes, he wishes he was still amoral enough to do whatever he wants- or in this case, to refrain from doing something he really hadn't wanted to do.

He doesn't like mending Hermione - not when Weasley had been the one to break her. He doesn't like propping her up and giving her a hug until she feels better, and then setting her back on the proper course of righteousness, back to Weasley, back to Potter and his ginger-haired offspring.

She's strong, in a volatile, fluid sort of way - and when people hurt her, it can flow right out the soles of her feet until she's an empty shell, a child. She shouldn't be hurt like that. She ought to be able to do as she wants, instead of constantly being dragging back by the fishing reel that connects the three of them.

It isn't really fair to her, and it's really not fair to him.

Eventually, though, when he arrives at work, he settles into his cubicle and focuses on a line edit with all of his available brain power. The result is a marked lack of Hermione floating around the recesses of his mind, and though he hates to admit it, it's a refreshing change.

Being the one to be helping her - Hermione Granger, of all people - blows his mind whenever he thinks about it, and the realisation that his life has shrunk to miniscule proportions and then inflated around this one being - _Hermione Granger,_ for crying out loud - increases it tenfold. He isn't used to this. He doesn't want to get used to this, because she's got a life, and the likelihood of her abandoning it for him is miniscule.

The remaining 99.9 percent of possible outcomes will devastate him if he maintains this state of mind.

So, when he's off for lunch, he finds Cordelia in the break room and invites her out to dinner that night. She smiles, and she's gracious and throws a few playful barbs that are coloured with an 'I've seen you naked' vibe, and everybody in the room notices.

He walks back to his cubicle and finds that he's stumbling a bit, because hey, perhaps his world isn't that small, after all.

* * *

Four days. They pass erratically, feeling interminably slow one moment and lightning fast the next. At first, she declines dinner with George, because she isn't sure what he's heard and she doesn't want to hear about how Ron's sleeping on his couch and devastated. It's almost worse to consider that perhaps he's happy about the time apart, and she can't take hearing that, either.

She gives it thought, though, on the train ride home, and comes to the conclusion that the reason she and George have bonded is their mutual need to stifle some things. He understands. She's certain of it, and she calls him as soon as she gets home.

"You look lovely, Hermione." He greets her the same way whenever they meet, and kisses her cheek as she grips him lightly, and it's a precursor to a pleasant evening even if enthusiasm hasn't coloured his tone since Fred.

"How's the business?" she asks, flattening her napkin onto her lap and smoothing the creases until it's a white square sitting perfectly with the black dress beneath.

He opens his menu, passes her the wine list, and answers contemplatively, "Oh, booming. We've worked the kinks out of those wind-up spy cockroaches - they don't bite anymore - and they've been quite a hit."

"Well, no doubt. And how are the renovations going?" They were adding another level to the shop, already towering over the other buildings in Diagon Alley, and George had brandished blueprints at her for about six months before building began. She spends more time there than an adult should in a toyshop, but her disapproval had vanished years ago and she explores the inventing room in George's basement as often as she can.

"As well as can be expected. You've met our contractor; not the sharpest warlock."

It's still as though George has forgotten that any singular pronouns exist. He refers to himself as 'we' in every second breath, and her heart breaks a little for him whenever he realises his mistake.

His face contorts and then falls, and he stares intently at the menu, though his eyes take nothing in.

"Well," she says, an attempt to sooth him, "you and Ron put a lot of work into the planning; and I told you, you're paying for a service. If you're unsatisfied with the contractor, you should look at the list of other companies I referred you to."

His face raises and his eyes meet hers, and the transition is quicker, nowadays. He snatches upon the predominant aspect of her sentence and asks tentatively, "How are you going, with that?"

"As well as can be expected," she mimics, but then answers, "Well, you know. It's... complicated. I'm giving it a few days."

"So is he," George agrees, nodding understandingly, but she pounces.

"So, Ron's spoken to you about it?"

She had _known_ there was a reason she initially declined George's dinner invitation. It's her own lack of self control, her inherent curiosity concerning Ron, that's making this difficult.

"Hermione," he warns, lowering the menu. "I don't want to get into the middle of you two." Upon seeing her face fall, though - and she swears it hadn't been intentional or some sort of bid or sympathy - he adds, "You could tell me what you're thinking, though."

"No, it's all right. Should we share the entrée platter? You'll have to eat the squid, though."

"Hermione..."

By the time their risottos come, she's recounted the entire thing, explained the way she had to Harry that morning, but since to George Draco is just 'that Malfoy git', no deep loathing, no childhood nemesis issues to work past, she's able to be a little freer, a little more honest.

"I like him. He... understands. I don't want it to cause such awful fights between Ron and I, because there's nothing happening there. Doesn't Ron understand that?"

"I'm not sure he does."

"And, if I can't mention Draco without Ron storming out - I don't know, it's hardly a healthy relationship, with that level of paranoia."

George sticks his fork into the rice on his plate and stares at it for a moment before he glances up, inhaling deeply as though he has something important to say.

"I'm only going to interfere to this extent. Call the boy. Talk it through. And, if it turns out that you have to choose one or the other- well, it seems fairly obvious, Hermione, and I'm not being biased, because I know that he can be a shit. He's been in your life for fourteen years."

"And Draco-"

"You've been friends with him for, what, a month?"

It does seem obvious, now that it's being pointed out to her, but it's not so easy to forget the way they mesh, the way he was there for her only nights earlier. They've both come so far, her from hating him, him from his egotistical bigotry and all round horribleness, and they've evolved into the sort of people who get along brilliantly.

And, excuses aside, she likes him.

A month, give or take, though - she's known Ron for _fourteen_ years, and loved him for most of it. If it means that much to him, if it would damage their relationship? George is right. She'll make the obvious choice.

She wants not to talk about this anymore. She needs to speak to Ron, but for now, she's going to change the subject and have dinner with one of her friends, because she has to remind herself that her world doesn't revolve around two boys and a few supporting characters. She has a life, and she had a life before them both, and she'll have one again if anything changes.

George sees her face and changes the topic for her, starts to talk carefully about his plans for the shop. As she knew he would, he eventually shows her plans that he had scanned onto his phone - "There's an app for that" - and they brainstorm, with him bouncing ideas off her head and her heartily disapproving of anything potentially dangerous.

"Really, George, I'm very enthusiastic about your business, but if you give children super-punch gloves, they'll kill each other."

"Protective foam bodysuits- no, _floating _foam bodysuits - a treat for both the young and the young at heart!"

"George..."

"Well, I'm developing shoes that walk on water, and frankly, Hermione, I don't care if the little darlings drown-"

"George!"

"Stop that- I was kidding!"

They buy apple turnovers and take them back to George's house in plastic containers, because he wants her to see the new range of fireproof capes he'd made for the company Charlie works for. He lives out of the city, and he Floos to work but has mastered the art of the automobile, so he drives them both there while she eats her dessert and half of his. The house is spectacular, on a vast patch of land not unlike the Burrow's, and surrounded with spotty orchards of apple trees and something else with huge leafy canopies and a marvellous scent. It's secluded, as George seems to prefer it, and is brimming with strange furniture or artefacts he thinks Fred would have liked. He keeps the bunk bed they had shared when they were young in a spare bedroom, and when it rains (lightning crackling and he remembers how Fred had been the only one to know he hates storms) he sleeps in Fred's top bunk.

She hugs him as soon as they get out of the car, because he's blinking a lot and she can't imagine what it's like to lose a twin. "I'm sorry I ate your turnover," she says into his collarbone, and surprising her and himself, he laughs.

"Come on," he says, hooking an arm around her - it's strange, because they never have much contact, but things feel as though they've been tipped on their axes recently - and leading her into the house.

Ron's in the kitchen, in his pyjamas, in the process of boiling the kettle. As soon as they walk into the room, George offering tea, he freezes and stares at her like a rabbit in the headlights, as though he had been doing something wrong.

"Ron!" She discreetly elbows George in the pancreas - _sneaky bastard_ - and swallows her heart back into her chest. "I- didn't know you were staying here."

"Oh, you know," he says, still sheepish, ignoring the whistling kettle, "home was feeling lonely, and we had work to do on the shop."

"I'm- I'm sorry, should I leave?"

It's George who intervenes, turning away from the kettle with a mug of coffee cupped in his hand and saying firmly, "No, but I think I will. You two, talk."

He closes the double doors to the kitchen carefully but with authority, eyeing them both to make sure neither bolts. She has no plans to do so, because now that she's in a confined space with Ron, with George's words and her own concise thoughts spinning in her head, the past few days feel as though they've never happened.

The silence is broken by the clatter of another tea cup, and then he says, only just avoiding her eyes, "Would you like a cup of tea?" He swallows, heavily, when she accepts, and with nothing to occupy her, she sits at the counter with her feet dangling below her. It's awkward, but not uncomfortable. She doesn't lack the willpower, only the words.

"Ron," she begins. "I should have told you about Draco earlier. I'm sorry."

She had vowed to herself in petty anger that she wouldn't apologise to him, but if there's anything she's learned in these seven years, it's that sometimes in a relationship, you have to let go of the little things. For the greater good, she tells herself, but to be honest, she's long forgotten all of those bitter mental comments.

He seems to forget about the tea, and rotates to face her and say, in turn, "I shouldn't have yelled at you. I'm- sorry, too."

"We've got to talk about this," she reminds him, as he brings two mugs over to the counter and sits beside her. "We can't just forget it ever happened."

"I'd like to," he offers, "because I was an absolute bloody git."

She laughs, in spite of herself, and takes his hand in her free one.

There are a few minutes where they get back into the rhythm of each other, and it's strange, how even four days can get them so out of sync. There's kissing, some laughing, and for the most part, their tea cools unnoticed. It's always the way - they fight a lot, but if there's a real issue involved, they wait until they're together and high off the thrill of rekindled love and anxious to keep tensions cooled, before they confront it.

They detach from one another and wait until the heavy breathing subsides before Hermione takes the reins.

"Ron," she says seriously, making eye contact over her mug. "Can you really not stand my having Draco Malfoy in my life?"

"No," he says firmly, meeting her eyes. He's not a coward, whatever anyone says, and he's well equipped to handle her and her temper. It's why they work well together, but it sometime makes their Serious Discussions too much like a Mexican standoff to make much headway.

"To the extent that you would jeopardise our relationship over it? That you would choose ending it over my remaining friends with him?"

He freezes, and stares at her through wrinkled eyes as though to say, 'Are you kidding? What are you playing at?' Out loud, he hesitantly replies, "Well, I wouldn't go that far-"

She takes both of his hands, and they're shaking near-imperceptibly in hers. He thinks that she's going to break up with him, over Draco Malfoy. She knows him well enough to be able to tell that he's literally petrified for the state of their relationship.

"I'm not going to make you choose," -Her lips are at his ear, so close, and he loosens, ever so slightly- "I love you, Ron, and if you really think that you can't handle him- see, I'm trying to make some allowances, because I know it's always you changing things on my behalf, and- I want you to know that I'm in this, completely."

'_Then marry me,' she sees him mouth,_ _and she nods yes and flings her arms around her neck and the world is at peace_.

He stays silent, his mouth closed, but his grip on her hands is life-threateningly tight and his face is brimming over with something akin to grateful joy.

"You're bloody insane," he says, just before he kisses her, "and I love you, Hermione Granger."

George ventures in when they've swept their mugs to the side and they're kissing, him standing between her legs as she's perched on the bench. Her hands stay knotted in his hair, and he keeps a firm grip on her waist as they turn in unison to confirm George's "All well?"

They separate eventually, and she says, "So, where are these capes?"

"Capes?" Ron's head twists to stare at George. "I thought you sent those off last week- George, Charlie's going to kill you; they needed them before they left to rescue those Azerbaijani dragons-"

"Oh, I did." Without a trace of sheepishness, George adds, "Sorry, Hermione."

She can't bring herself to care, because it's not as though she wouldn't have rushed to Ron's empty house anyway. She does narrow her eyes, though, and say, "I'm glad I ate your turnover. If you'll excuse us..." She turns to Ron. "Your place or mine?"

George rolls his eyes and pretends to vomit over the counter as Ron escorts her to the door with his arm tucked around her. They Apparate onto the sidewalk outside Hermione's apartment, and from then it's all warm and mouths and tongues and clothes and notquitehonest 'Draco _who?'_ She makes her choice, and for now, it's easy to live with.


	8. Chapter 8

He calls Hermione twice the next morning, because Cordelia had fumbled with her keys outside her flat and they had the awkward first kiss even though they've already seen each other in the paroxysms of coitus more times than he can count on his fingers. It had been strange, and unexpected, and mostly he was calling to show her that she wasn't the only girl in his life.

She doesn't answer, and he isn't surprised - she has a job, after all, and an important one which he supposes leaves her with less spare time than he has. He's stretched out in his swivel chair with his feet crossed and his mismatched socks showing, with the phone between shoulder and ear as though he's calling a client.

He won't get caught, though, because he's in a conveniently located corner, secluded and far enough from the office that the manager doesn't walk over more than once a week. He's done a spot of decorating recently, and his cubicle wall in unnaturally colourful and covered. He hadn't bothered in the past because he had never been sure he would stay long, but now the note with Hermione's number is pinned in the centre with a purple tack, creased almost beyond recognition (_she anchors him_) and surrounded by drawings, quotes scrawled on scraps of paper, and that one picture of them both that he has, taken outside a restaurant by a zealous tourist with a Polaroid camera. Her hair is ruffled by the wind, and she's wearing a coat that had reminded him acutely of the difference between then-Hermione and now-Hermione. She's smiling as though caught in mid-sentence, and in fact, she had been. He's got an arm slung theatrically around her for the picture and grins moronically, but it's not at his own face that he glances contemplatively as he listens to the sound of the phone ringing emptily.

He abandons his attempt and does some work, but it doesn't engage him so before long he's staring vacantly at the wall in front of him again, with the pen twiddling aimlessly between his fingers. He does his best to maintain his focus, even goes to get coffee from the break room to perk himself up, and it lasts for another hour or so before he gives up and calls Cordelia on the floor below.

"Hey!" She sounds genuinely pleased to hear from him, and he's sort of sorry that he can only half return the gesture, because most of his sincere-early-relationship-excitement goes to someone else entirely. "What're you up to?"

"Oh, you know. Half-earning a pay check but mostly just practising my woolgathering stares. You?"

"Well," and she lowers her voice, half-covers the receiver with her hand to whisper, "the scandal today is that Josie's sleeping with Madeleine's husband, who, incidentally, works here too. They had it out just before; it was very exciting."

"Oh, is that what that was? I thought you guys were playing Ceiling Pong again."

"No, that was Madeleine beating the shit out of Roger with a broom. We're a lively bunch, aren't we?"

"That's certainly one word for it. How's the man doing?"

"Concussion, and soon, a heavy bill from a divorce lawyer. Pity about that, really."

"I can tell you're just devastated."

"Well, not that I'm one to judge, but the cheating bastard got his just desserts, and I'm thinking about spilling yoghurt on Josie in the break room later. Ooh, wait- the boss is coming; I've got to go, talk later." She kissed the air into the phone, and the line was cut.

Speaking to Cordelia had certainly appeased his boredom, but he's uneasy, now, wondering what she would think if she knew about Hermione.

"We're just friends," he says, under his breath, as though he's rehearsing it for later recital. It plays again and again in his head, and he works to the tune of this mantra, counting the minutes until it's socially acceptable to try to call Hermione again.

* * *

She doesn't check her phone, or even hear it, because it's with bleary reluctance that she rolls away from Ron and out of bed with the prospect of work a dark cloud over her head. She lets him drive her to work and they eat a hasty breakfast in rush hour traffic, toast and scrambled eggs in a Ziploc bag on their laps. She kisses him goodbye, breathing a coffee-stained 'I love you' through the car window, and then rushes into the elevator, oblivious to her phone buzzing silently in her handbag.

Once she's settled into her office, she has the time to listen to her messages and experience the crippling guilt as she listens to his cheerful voice. It's all too apparent that he doesn't realise - and how could he? She'll have to speak to him at some point, to vocalise her regret and explain the justification she had engineered at length the night before and- her voice would break and she'd apologise it all away and have to face Ron again. Perhaps it would be better to do this over the phone.

While she works up the courage and works out what she'll say, though - and it's starting to seem as though that's all her life is, rehearsing and conducting Very Serious Conversations with people she cares about - she has a gnome dispute and complaints from the bitter resident goblin to sort out.

She has lunch with Harry at a café in the next block, because even though he works at the Ministry, in the Auror Department, they barely see one another. He's calm and reserved when she tells him about the day's events, but she can see that he's pleased, and Harry's approval always brings her peace of mind.

"Ginny's been asking about you," he says suddenly, reaching over to steal one of her fries. "Incessantly, actually."

She's not entirely apologetic about that, but she feels slightly guilty, particularly for the strain it must put on Harry. "I'll call her about that soon, I promise."

Harry gives her that look, where he stares at her over his glasses with raised eyebrows, and she grimaces. "Fine, I'll pay her a visit." Most of the time, he's fairly level and understands that girl friends have disagreements, but he has moments of newlywed elation where he can't fathom his wife being anything less than godlike to everyone.

She's anxious to change the subject away from Ginny, but he's stuck his claws in stubbornly. "You know, she's thinking about naming it after you, if it's a girl?"

She winces. "Oh, don't - you won't be doing the child a favour."

He raises his eyebrows again and she realises that there was a compliment implicit in his comment. "I mean, it's lovely of her, but I'd advise against it."

"Secretly," he confides, leaning forward only partly to get at her discarded onion, "I'm hoping for a boy. I think it's a boy."

"Girls are the superior gender, Harry," she scolds, slapping his hand away from her plate, and they fall into playful banter about how he's adopted Ginny's pregnancy cravings for her.

It's unfortunate, really, that Ginny had gone and fallen with child just at a pivotal point in Hermione's life and relationships. She doesn't blame her, of course, with more than the expected accusation at the stress it was causing Harry, but she wishes she had a girlfriend to talk to about this. The boys were doing a cracking job at giving advice, but their perspectives were so different - _flawed_ - and sometimes, she needed to have a decent rant without being lulled into complacency with logic and reason.

_She's_ the logical one, after all, and logic doesn't bode well with Ginny's irrational state at the moment.

She sends a message back with Harry: "Tell her it's all right, we're fine, and I'll come and see her, soon."

He's content enough to pass it along, but narrows his eyes in that serious way and advises her, "You can't repress everything, Hermione - she's open enough to a bit of argument; it might take her mind off the difference between peach and papaya whip paint colours."

She sneaks back into the office and leaves an over-cheerful message on Ginny's answering machine, mid-way through the time she knows is allocated for her afternoon nap (and she isn't slightly hoping to wake her, or anything).

She realises, though, as soon as she hangs up the phone, that the petty tactic of leaving a message for Draco isn't sufficient. It's well and good to convey her displeasure with a friend, but to sever their friendship and their connection entirely? It isn't fair, and it isn't her.

She writes him a letter. The words are harder than they've ever been, and it takes her most of the afternoon and the goblin complaints are ignored in deference to it, and she makes a stop on the way home and slips it under his door before she continues to Ron's house, before she can change her mind.

"There," she whispers. "Done."

And, it is.

* * *

He slips on it before he sees it, because the envelope is of texture just slippery enough to grip onto the sole of his foot and send him flying into the coffee table.

Ignoring the footprint across the front, once he's climbed to his feet and his heart rate has settled back to normal, he recognises Hermione's handwriting in a heartbeat. His name, with the 'D' and the 'M' loopy and dominant, the rest thin and tight but for the huge tail of the 'y'. He can't recall ever seeing it written in her hand before, but he knows it well.

He doesn't stop to consider the implications, what this all might mean, but immediately rips through the wax seal and the name written in black fountain pen. One page, covered on half of one side. With dread starting to ball solidly in his stomach, he starts to read. His head spins and his pride hurts and he screws it into a clump and throws it in the fireplace, which he lights a moment later with a vicious prod. For good measure, he probes at it, hard, with the poker, and then lets it clatter to the floor and Apparates to the front of Cordelia's building where, fittingly enough, it's raining violently, and he's soaked and miserable by the time he fights his way up to the third floor and kisses her hard as soon as she opens the door in her lingerie.

_

* * *

_

Draco. I'm so sorry to have to do this, again, but regrettably, I have to make it clear and indisputable. This will be the last communication you receive from me.

_As you know, Ron is uncomfortable with your presence in my life, and mine in yours. I hope that you can find it in yourself to attempt to understand him, at least, for he has gone through and lost so much that he views to be contributed to by your participation- you must understand. He has the same issues I did- do, without any iota of the closure I gained in our early meetings. He lost his brother, people he cared about. He's angry, and, justifiably so, does not believe that a future where the three of us co-exist is likely, or even possible. I have come to understand his stance on the matter and, even, to agree with it, and adopt it as my own. _

_I believe - and it has been made clear to me that - the continuance of this- friendship we have would be to directly jeopardise Ron's and my future. I cannot, in full conscience, undermine my relationship with Ron for anything, and though it pains me, I must include you in this category._

_I enjoyed our time together immensely, and will continue to regard you as a priceless part of my journey to maturity and, I hope, a polite acquaintance. It has been brought to my attention, however, that our friendship was not only endangering my relationship but perceived as attempting to injure it, that is to say... I'm sorry, conciseness is failing me, and there are few ways to word my emotions on the matter._

_We are friends. I value you and your contribution to my life, so much. It is undeniable, though, that a close friendship such as that we began to construct was viewed as threatening to Ron, for I found in you what I did not have in him: you were a confidante, a likeminded soul who I could trust and speak to, and through you, I worked through many underlying issues that plagued my personal relationships. Thank you._

_I believe we have both received considerable benefit from the few weeks I have been privileged to have your company. I, as formerly mentioned, have received closure and extinguished the latent anger I felt for you after all this time. I hope that you have doused the guilt that you voiced to me, over what has happened in the past and your part in it, and I wish you well in your future endeavours with a clear conscience as to the events of seven years ago. I hope that-_

Fuck it. I'm so sorry, Draco, but I can't let him go. It's them - all of them - or you. Forgive me.

Hermione


	9. Chapter 9

He stays with Cordelia the entire weekend, wearing his work pants and letting her parade around in only his business shirt, making coffee and toast and soup from a can. On Monday, he has to go home, to get his briefcase and to shower, and it doesn't at all ache to stride past the fireplace and know that only blocks away, Hermione is with _him_, and considers Draco well and truly out of her life. She's tucked him away into a distant corner of that box, neatly folded and labelled 'past baggage – useless' in her neat, upright handwriting.

It occurs to him when he arrives at work and convinces his boss that a case of life-threatening gastroenteritis had prevented him from completing his assigned projects, ignoring Cordelia pointedly giggling away at the copy machine. He shuffles back to his desk and realises that Hermione may be the female, but she isn't allowed to make this decision for the both of them. He's not going to let her slip from his grasp quite so easily, and he'll be damned if he's going to take a page of scrawled utter crap and one line of guilty truth and be done with. He's not going to disappear into the shadows and let her live a happy life with Weasley. He's going to need a little more than that.

* * *

It doesn't take much to persuade one of Hermione's colleagues to let him into her office on his lunch break. It's approximately seven and a half minutes before Hermione returns.

The first thing she sees is him, with his feet up on her desk, the very image of the old-Draco that is exactly what makes her paranoid about letting him in.

"What are you doing in my office?" she asks, and it's so close to weariness, that tone in her voice, that he almost wishes he'd never come.

"We need to talk," he says, spinning back and forth in her chair, using his heels on her blotter as an anchor.

Normally she would spit out something sarcastic and quick, but the sight of him has taken the energy out of her. She just drags another chair over to the other side of her desk and waits.

She expects an interview, rapid fire questions designed to peer into the very depths of her soul - the physical arrangement of the room is certainly conducive to such a meeting. He takes his feet off the desk, though, and waits in silence for something she isn't sure how to say.

He takes careful note of the way her face contorts briefly and then folds into uneasy tension. She doesn't know. She truly has no reason for the constant pull-and-tug of in-her-life, out-of-her-life. He thinks he knows her reasons better than she does, but he's tired of letting her off the hook so easily. He wants an explanation; he wants her to have to face her issues herself, because it's not as black-and-white as she - as all her opinionated friends - might think.

If she still resents_hates_ him for everything that happened at school, he could accept that. He would come to terms with it, eventually, and he would move on.

If that's all it is - the remnant disgust (and he feels it too, even now) from seven years ago - she wouldn't be able to stomach coming back every time. Life would be the constant back-back-back instead of the pendulous -and _forth_ that accompanies every attempt to distance herself from him.

He needs to know. It's about more than closure.

Suddenly, she stands up, and gestures for him to, too. He stands, obediently, and she forces him around the desk and takes her seat in her own office chair, clearly choosing to be dominant now.

"I'm devoted to my relationship with Ron," she say carefully, strongly, well-rehearsed, "and I believe that in order to maintain and strengthen it, I've got to- I'm sorry, Draco, I truly am."

"Bullshit. Don't lie to me."

What's that in his eyes? He's looking at her so intensely, so matter-of-factly, that she legitimately thinks he's reading her mind (and listening to her 'yes. It's bullshit').

"Hermione," he says in a low voice, enough prompting and unhappy reserve evident in his tone to set off her stomach on a violent merry-go-round of clenching guilt. "Why do you keep pushing me away?"

"Why do you keep coming back?" she wants to say, and it's only after he starts and then stares at her with unblinking eyes for interminable moments that she realises that it had slipped out, all the same.

When he speaks again, he's avoided her question entirely (because it brings up so many issues that he would need a trained professional to address them). "Hermione, I'm breaking my back to try to make up for seven years - I need to know."

She doesn't want to cry in front of him - although Lord knows she's done enough of that already (and he had been there, every time over the past few weeks, a veritable tower of comforting strength). The tears are brewing, though, and hasn't she outgrown the rampant emotion that seems to strike whenever she's around him?

"I'm supposed to hate you," she whispers into her hands, so quiet and jagged that he barely picks up the words and can only string them together tentatively (hopefully).

"Then do it," he challenges, on his feet and suddenly bursting with anger at this strong woman who's allowing her friends to make her decisions for her. "Why don't you?"

And she's so _weak_.

"I'm trying-" and her breath comes in ragged chunks. "I want to-"

"Do it," he says again, still standing, still staring at her, "because it's not fair. You aren't allowed to call every shot, Hermione, and you can't decide when you're bored enough to want me in your life again. One day, I'm going to stop coming."

"So stop," she cries, and suddenly she's angry as well and he isn't sure what to do with it. "Everything was _fine_ before you-"

"Yes, everything's wonderful in your life," he retorts. "You've got such a _functional_ relationship. I know you, Hermione, and your life was _not_ perfect."

"No!" She's on her feet, and the sound of her fist on the desk startles him into tripping backwards over his chair a little. "You do _not_ come into my office, into my place of work, and criticise me. You're doing exactly what they did- what Ginny did. I've made my choice: I choose the man I love over a man I've known properly for less than a month, a man who made my schooling years _hell_."

"You're going to keep that card up your sleeve for the rest of your life, aren't you? Ready to pull it out whenever you run out of the excuses your boyfriend's fed to you? Come on, Hermione. Stop lying to me."

She clenches her fists and grits her teeth and forces out, "I want to hate you. Logically, I should, and I think I might, a little, but- I- I can't. I can't do this."

Hearing it doesn't bring the satisfaction he had expected. If anything, he feels guilty and hollow, all of a sudden, and in a swoop of that terrible noble conscience he feels nowadays, decides that he's going to let her have her fairytale with Weasley, after all.

"Thank you," he says, under his breath. Her hands are still gripping the edge of the desk; her neat bun has fallen into inexplicable disarray and curled hanks hang loose, framing her face. He walks away and doesn't look back until he's outside the building, smothering a wishful hope that maybe she's chased after him, to ask him not to leave.

He doesn't really have the strength to uphold this noble act for much longer, so he puts distance and time in between them and goes back to work, forces himself to concentrate because _she's not the centre of his life_.

(Honestly. She isn't.)

* * *

It's nearing midnight by the time Ron gets home, and Hermione's waiting for him.

"Hi," she says, yawning in spite of herself as she kisses him hello. "There's chicken in the refrigerator if you're hungry."

He drops his bag and kicks his shoes off under the hall table, and he's busily unwinding the slate grey scarf she'd bought him from his neck when he suddenly uses one arm to stop her in her tracks and push intruding hair back from her face so he can kiss her properly.

"Hello to you, too," he says, and nonchalantly walks to the kitchen to heat himself a plate of food.

It's not as though he's trying to show her what a good choice she made – she already knows that she did the right thing; she doesn't need to be informed of it. Curious, though, she follows him into the kitchen as he bustles around the cutlery drawer and has trouble taking the lid off the container, at which point she elbows him tidily out of the way so she can do it for him.

"How was your day?" she ventures, sneaking a sideways glance at him to see if he's still got that vague, ordinary expression on his face.

He does, and he grins pleasantly at her before responding, "Oh, the usual trope. George is in one of those moods – tried to set all of the walking alarm clocks on me at one point."

She trails after him to the living room, where he sets himself up with his plate on his lap and the television still flickering mutely from where she'd paused it. She sits next to him, her knees sort of overlapping onto his legs, and she knows she's being a little clingy but he's always been the more tactile of the two of them. He glances across at her, and she almost draws back, but in typical Ron fashion he almost inhales the food and then sets his plate down on the coffee table. He very nearly bundles her onto his lap, but once they kiss a bit and then reorganise, her legs are just draped over his, fingers linked.

"You didn't have to wait up," he says, lazily drawing circles on her knee with his forefinger.

"Oh, I don't mind."

"You're a liar, Hermione Granger. You're about to fall asleep right now."

"I'm not-" A yawn interrupts her, rendering her words meaningless. Without letting her protest, he scoops her up, even though she hates being carried, hates the way she can't just rest her head against his chest like she did when her father carried her as a child, hates the way her mind is flooded with weight worries and 'oh, God, what if he drops me?'

"Ron-" He covers her mouth with the nearest available part of flesh, which happens to be his forearm, and her objection is muffled for as long as it takes for him to walk her to the bedroom. It's quite unceremonious, the way he dumps her on the bedspread, but she's hardly expecting rose petals and candlelight- not when she's this ti-ti-_tired_.

"See?" He watches her yawn with a smirk – _and it burns her to the core, all of a sudden, to see his mouth twisting the way Draco's still does_. It vanishes the next second, and his face is once again smooth and freckled and dopey and _Ron_. She wants to shake her head, hard, in time with the cow bells, as though she's a bewildered character in a cartoon, to rid it of the image and of the piercing recognition she'd felt.

It's with scarce clarity that she decides that the quickest way to do so is to fall asleep. She doesn't feel his body slip between the sheets, an hour later, or the way his fingers joined around her middle and held her tight. She doesn't see the faint smile on his face, or hear the way he's thinking about their future and the blissful lack of Malfoy in their lives. She sleeps on, as he lies awake.

* * *

When he wakes up, he's smiling. It's more because of the fact that Cordelia's mouth is close to his neck, blowing a feather-light breath of air against his throat, than from any real happiness. Momentary joy is more than enough for him, anyway. He's grown aware that it's a perfectly sustainable way of life.

"Hey," she says, whispering low, as he opens his eyes.

"Morning, darling. How did you sleep?"

He's getting better at this- at not leaving at dawn when he's supposed to, at sticking around and eating the pancakes she cooks wearing that same shirt of his. He thinks maybe he might be her boyfriend, and he thinks that maybe he doesn't mind.

"I slept _good_," and she elongates the last word into a purr and he stifles the urge to correct her grammar and then he grabs onto her upper arms and rolls her on top of him.

"You're _welcome_."

He picks the buttons undone, one by one, until his shirt is flapping open and she's daring him to continue. She swipes her hair back, raking her fingers through it so that he can see her face – and it's straight and it's black and _God_-

"I'm sorry," he whispers, and she's off of him and rolled over onto the other side and he's out the door with his clothes bundled under one arm. "I have to go- emergency." The lie only slips out when he's standing in the elevator facing closed doors, but he struggles into his pants and runs as soon as they open.

He can't take it. He can't _do_ it. It's all well and good to move on with his life and pretend that she hasn't stamped her goddamn name all over it in indelible ink, but, Jesus, when that glint splashes into someone else's eyes? It's too much.

He'll wind up back in her bed before the week's out – it doesn't take a genius to know it. For now, though, he climbs onto _her_ train, sits in _her_ compartment, _her_ very seat, and he knows she won't be on it but he sits there all the same.

"I want to hate you. Logically, I should, and I think I might, a little, but- I- I can't. I can't do this."

She's on repeat in his mind; her words meld into the whirring of the train on the tracks. She can't do this? He can't fucking _not_ do this.

At some point, the clouds open up – goddamn _London_ – and he's tempted to do an angsty walk-in-the-rain with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, or even to run to her apartment with his hair dripping into his eyes and-

He gets off the train at his stop, and shields his head with his jacket. He goes home. His answering machine is bright and beeping with what he assumes is a torrent of curse words and crying from Cordelia. He unplugs it at the wall and falls asleep face down on the bed.

* * *

"Good morning."

He spares her an indecipherable mumble through a mouthful of scrambled eggs. Still, though, he puts down the newspaper and looks up at her and grins.

"Very nice, Ronald."

She takes half of the newspaper (because she's perfectly aware that he doesn't _really_ care about the finance section, just the Quidditch) and makes coffee. He glances up at some point, and it's almost instinctive when she avoids meeting his gaze.

"'Ermione," he says, his mouth full again. "Something the matter?"

"No," she says immediately. "Nothing at all. Would you pass me a napkin?"

He watches her, silently, over the top edge of the newspaper, and she briskly ignores the sound of his loud chewing and the even louder sound of his eyes keening into her. She finishes her cup of coffee. She rinses it in the sink. She pulls a hat over her head and shrugs into her coat, and she goes to work with barely another word.

Ron sits at the table with the newspaper still propped limply in front of him, dangling precariously near to his breakfast, and he tries to figure out why their happily ever after is going so completely and utterly wrong. This was supposed to have fixed everything, remember? They were supposed to be able to get back on track, now.

He's underestimated Hermione – his girlfriend, his love, who he knows better than he knows himself and can decipher with a mere glance at the muddled, tangled mess that she sometimes is. No – he knows her too well. He knows her great capacity to care, the way she can't hold a grudge. It's that slime, Malfoy, he's underestimated.

Days pass. She talks less and less. It's difficult for him to keep up, to compensate so that the uncomfortable silences in their conversations aren't numerous or long lasting.

They sit at her kitchen bench and eat a dinner that's silent, for the most part, consisting of questions or comments from his end and succinct responses from hers. She's doing her best to be pleasant, but he already knows that the joy he'd felt at being her first choice, her only choice, isn't worth the look on her face. It's faded, anyway, and he's decided that he wants nothing more than for her to be happy, even if it means losing his advantage over Malfoy.

It's part of growing up, really. He's learning that some things are bigger than just him and her.

"Compromise," he says aloud, unsure of where he's going to head with this and barely certain he's spoken audibly, anyway.

She turns her head, drops her fork. "Excuse me?"

"We need to compromise, to make this work. I don't want you to resent me because you feel I've forced you to make a choice. I don't want you to be..." He pauses uncomfortably. "Y'know. Unhappy."

She raises an eyebrow and stares at him in that intelligently suspicious way Hermione's always had, and then in the next nanosecond realises that she hasn't been doing as well a job of hiding it as she had hoped. She pastes a smile across her face, shows her teeth and makes her eyes sparkle so it seems believable, but he knows her better than that.

"Ron, I don't know what you've got into your head, but I'm perfectly happy-"

He knows her better than that, too.

"Hermione. If you really want Malfoy around, I'll deal with him. I- I can't promise I'll be polite, or even moderately civil, but I'm not going to make your decisions for you."

He's taken her face in both of his hands, even though he has a smear of carbonara sauce that's transferred to her cheek, and she's gazing at him, sort of in awe.

And it's sort of awesome, and what he wouldn't do to have her look at him like this all the time.

"But Ron," she protests finally, once the cogs have whirred into place in her mind and she realises what he's suggesting they do. "You would have to make as big an allowance as I did in severing ties- it's just reversing the situations."

"I'll deal," he repeats firmly, and takes up his fork again, as though to say in a convincingly manly manner, 'No discussion; the decision is made'. He thinks he'd quite like to be the man of a household, rather than a bachelor in control of all his own affairs. Hermione would keep him in line, of course, and they would fight even more than they do now, but it would be worth it to wake up beside her every morning and get breakfast ready for their kids - and, he's kind of been in love with her for as long as he can remember.

What's that mantra, though, that he doesn't go a day without repeating to himself? He tells himself to take things slowly, to live in the moment. He knows Hermione's view on moving faster, has heard her objection of 'things are going so well as they are; can't we stay like this a little longer?' more times than he can count. It's healthier for everyone if he just keeps on repeating to himself and keeps his mouth closed.

(She grabs her coat and he encourages her out the door. As soon as she leaves, he breaks a glass – by purposeful accident – and he hopes that the next time he's over in his girlfriend's apartment, Malfoy cuts himself on it and bleeds out an artery.)


	10. Chapter 10

It's still raining. It beats obliquely at every window in the complex, but it feels as though it's hammering into his temples. After the first hour, the blood pounding in his head had begun to follow the same rhythm of the storm, a moment's respite every few seconds. There doesn't seem to be an end to it; he pushes his head deeper into the pillow and tries to muffle the sound.

More time passes, and his eyes are aching from being clenched so tightly closed, and he feels as though no blood can possibly be flowing anywhere in his body but his throbbing head.

In unison to the rain and the blood and the rise and swell of self-pity and silent anger comes a knock at the door.

Strong. Persistent. Maybe wavering the slightest bit on the fourth knock, as though his or her (herher_her_) hand is shaking, just a little.

He stumbles to his feet- takes a few seconds to rub hard at the skin over his temple (hoping to knead away this bad dream)- he walks to the door, tripping, slipping, staggering-

And she's there, in the middle of an attempt to shove her right arm into the right sleeve of her coat while extricating it from the other, with a scarf wound loosely around her neck and her hair flying out, messy, and-

He makes a very measured decision only to take in her frame, the inconsequential pieces of Hermione that surround her face, her eyes. After a moment, he just stares at the door of Mrs Krakinski's flat next door, past her head.

With the blurry foreground half-vision that you get when you focus on something in the distance, he can see her wring her hands and look at him, her mouth wide and gasping before she forces out three words.

"I'm so sorry."

She's crying. He quite firmly instructs his hand to close the door in her face.

A moment later, she uses magic to unlock it – damn her – and forces her way in, shedding her coat and about a bucketful more tears.

"Getting comfortable, are we?" He stands by the door with his arms folded; he can't make this easy for her. She can't just- get off scot-free like every other time. He has to fake at least a _semblance_ of dignity.

She pauses, in the middle of the room, and meets his eyes. Hers are round and dark and wet and he can see so clearly into her mind through them. 'He hates me,' he watches her think one second, and the next: 'He's really going to do this.' He can _see_ it, can _see_ the way the thought mars her facial expression.

She had walked in expecting for him to be happy to see her. For him to take her with open arms and let her apologise emptily for, once again, choosing Weasley over him. He doesn't blame her – he's Draco Malfoy, and the name itself comes with enough connotations to make her choice perfectly understandable.

But, Malfoy or not, he still has a bit of dignity stowed away inside him. He shakes it out from between his toes, behind his ears, rumples it out of his hair. It bunches and solidifies, until, inside him, there's a little hard ball of elegant hard-ass-ery. His stomach clenches around it – around the chicken burrito he'd had for lunch, around the empty, sinking void – and he pulls out his fiercest, most unimpressed glare. Eyes narrowed, will power hardened-

"Get out of my house."

"Wh-" She stops. The question dissolves on her tongue, like sugar but more bitter and acidic than anything she's ever tasted. It leaves a foul aftertaste that makes her want to gag at the same time as cry and shout and run back to Ron.

She doesn't, but she folds her coat neatly over her arm and walks towards the door. She won't run, and she certainly won't cry-

He lets her slip past him; he's standing close enough to the door that she can't move past without brushing against him. He's still in his pyjamas; her coat is made of that thick stylish fabric, rough against his bare forearm.

She's tiny – it isn't as though she's of under-average height, or anything, but he can see the top of her head as it droops towards her chest and he can see the way she looks fragile and a bit cracked.

_How unfortunate_, he thinks, and it's brief and it's sharp and he can't help but congratulate the horrible half of him that's so bitter. He's supposed to be standing up for himself, because really, he can't keep being pulled around like this. This isn't how life is supposed to go, following every passing whim of Hermione Granger. There's more to it. There must be.

"I really am sorry." Her forearm grazes his as she reaches for the door knob. In barely a whisper, she adds, "I know I'm weak. I- I'm sorry."

Her hand twists the door handle, thin white fingers clenching. He's struck with an image, lightening fast and overexposed in the forefront of his mind: _holding hands over the table- (they're just two people who met in a coffee shop)- strolling home- playful banter- bumping knees under the table at the pancake place- (they're just two people who met-)- she grins, wind in her hair- _

_(They're just two people.)_

"Wait," he says, and he hauls her back inside with two hands on her waist and he kicks closed the door and-

He doesn't kiss her. He wants to kiss her. They sit beside one another on his sofa in silence for several minutes and then she breaks it. She takes his hand in hers and, clasped and close, they rest on the crevasse between their touching knees.

"I made a mistake. I shouldn't have let him make- I shouldn't have made myself choose." And it hurts to have to admit it and it makes her heart thump hard hard _hard_ against her ribs and the blood pound in her ears because it feels as though this is one of those _moments_. She forces the words out and lets them simmer solidly in the air, with everything rushing in her ears as she waits for him to form some kind of response.

He glances at her, just barely, and simply says, "I told you I would stop coming back."

"You did stop. This is me, coming to you."

There's silence. It brims with emotion, still at times and then swirled wildly by their breath. There's anger, there's hurt, and there's- there's this, there's them.

"I still hate you a bit, Granger."

He does.

"Same to you, Malfoy."

And she means it.

It's a sort of hatred that's so intertwined with so many other things that it's not such a bad thing anymore. It's one strand that runs clearly through a rope that connects them. It's one of those things that won't sever, that won't fray – and really, when it's holding them together the way it does, they don't mind.

They stay like that for hours.

(More to life than this? He doesn't think so.)

* * *

Ron is asleep. Or, his eyes are closed, and he's arranged uncomfortably with the bedclothes twisted between his legs, exactly the way they are when he sleeps, and one arm is brought up beneath his head so that his forehead rests on the muscle. He breathes deeply, calmly (_panicking_) because he hears a key twist in the door.

He hears the door creak open, hears her step lightly inside and pad down the hallway to his bedroom. He doesn't want to speak to her. He's made his decision – and it _aches_ – but he's not going to talk to her about it. Not now.

"You _moron_." With some difficulty, Ginny hits him over the head with a pillow. "How could you?" she hisses. "How could you let this happen?"

"Hey! Hey- stop- Ginny!" He struggles upright and snatches the cushion from her hands. "Bloody _hell_, woman- are you mad?"

"You are an _idiot_," she says fiercely, hammering at him with her light fists now that he's taken her former weapon and is using it to bar him from any further attack.

"Thank you, Ginny, you're so bloody _lovely_-"

She narrows her eyes at him and curls up on his bed, ankles folded neatly beneath her. "What happened to taking a stand, being a man, all those _dozens_ of clichéd phrases you and Harry were swinging around the other night?"

"That was... a moment of weakness."

She snorts – at least, she exhales air through her nose in a way that drips with derision.

"It's for the best."

She snorts again, and even in the near-darkness of the room, only illuminated by a lamp in the far corner, he can see her piercing eyes surveying every inch of his face. Stupid kid sister. Too intuitive for her own good.

"You can't be happy with this," she says carefully, running her hand through his hair. "Ron. Talk to me."

He wants to snap '_no_' and petulantly curl back into the pillows. The thought flashes into his mind, though, of Hermione and Malfoy, talking, hugging, _kissing_, and, prickling with fury, he begins to speak.

"I'm allowed to want him gone," he assures Ginny, assures himself. "I am _right,_ damn it_._"

"I know you are," she soothes. Strange – she sounds almost like his mother.

"I mean- _any_ bloke would be angry if his girlfriend made best friends with another man. Who, by the way, is the epitome of pure evil."

"Yes, they would."

"And I'm not alone in this. You and Harry agree with me."

Tight-lipped, she revises, "_I_ agree with you. You know him. Always one foot in each court."

"Harry's a wanker," he scowls, "because I'm right."

"I know you are- but hey, go easy on him, would you? I fornicate with the man; the least you can do is afford him a bit of civility."

"_Ginny- _christ!"

She shrugs, barely at all sheepish, and prompts him to continue with an expression of indignant disgust still plain across his face.

"I can't lose her. I would lose her."

"Bullshit. She chose _you_, Ron, not him."

"Yeah, there's the ideal existence – watching her regret it every day of our bloody lives..."

"Oh, the melodrama. I _understand_, Ron, but you've got to give her a bit of credit. I'm annoyed at her, too, but she's not an idiot. She can weigh up her options with the best of them."

He sits up properly, and lets her trace the veins on the back of his right hand. "I've got to, Gin. I can't- control her. I've got to learn to be okay with this."

"Then, your decision's made, isn't it?"

"Yeah, s'pose it is."

* * *

Hermione leaves while he's asleep. He feels it as soon as he wakes up – the lack of the warm body next to him that had lulled him asleep in the first place. For a moment, he's worried, but a memory slips back like a whisper in his ear.

"Goodnight."

He feels the ghost of her lips against his cheek, as acutely as if it had happened a second ago. The rest of him is cold; somehow, his skin tingles in that spot alone.

Later, much later, he finds a pen of hers squished between the couch cushions. He glances from the couch to his keys to the door – she would be at home, it's not that far away, et cetera – but then falls back against the upholstery. No matter, he thinks. He _is_ going to get Hermione Granger back into this apartment.

* * *

"How was Malfoy?" he asks, with only the vaguest hint of sarcasm in his tone.

She hangs her hook on the coat and pulls a face. "Ron, you have no idea how glad I am that you-"

He waves a hand at her, purposely meets her eyes. "Coffee?"

He does a better job at pretence than she did. He can go about his daily routine, look into her eyes and grin mischievously with a snarky comment without showing the cracks the way she did.

She doesn't seem to realise. She doesn't notice at all; her eyes graze over his face without recognising the symptoms of an illness she had perfected. So, he carefully absorbs it all and stows it away into a corner of his mind. He can think and worry and stress later; he focuses quite intently on the way she bites her lip as she chooses a mug to use.

In fact, she's trying to seem casual and undiscerning as she takes the opportunity of minute peeks to try and piece out the expression on his face. She snatches tiny glances, enough to register only the downturned left corner of his mouth or the crinkle on the outside of his eyes.

She opens her mouth, wanting to probe gently and re-address the subject. Instead, her words are unexpected and entirely spontaneous.

"I think," she says, and her mind is rushing at a million miles per hour though her lips move slowly and her face twists into a thoughtful expression, "that we should go away together."

He freezes. "What?"

"Just for a little while," she says hastily, settling his hands around her waist. "It's been an age since we've had a holiday that hasn't consisted of television and pumpkin pasties around the apartment-"

"Hey-" he interrupts, "-don't knock the pasties, Hermione." His nose twitches, just for a brief instant, like a spasm that cracks his entire face into a huge grin a moment later. He grabs at her hands and she knows that he's as sold on the idea as she's managed to be in the three seconds since it popped into her head.

"So," she says, carefully, slowly, "where should we go?"

He spins her against the bench on his way to the refrigerator for orange juice. "Oh, I don't know- as far away from Malfoy as is physically possible?" He punctuates his own sentence with a guffaw, and then, more seriously, says, "Well, girl's choice: coast or country?"

"Coast," she decides, and consequently they find themselves, days later, curled in a rug on a beachside porch, having an animated argument about what Harry and Ginny ought to name their baby.

"_Obviously_ they'll name it after me."

"What if it's a girl?"

"Ronaldesca Potter? I don't see a problem with that at all."

"No, you wouldn't, would you? They'll name it after someone who meant a lot to them-"

"Yes, exactly- me."

"No, you moron. So long as they don't name it after Dumbledore, I'm happy. Coming from a 'Hermione', '_Albus_ Potter' wouldn't thank them."

"Yeah, lame. Name it... Ronalbus Potter. Ronington Potter the Fifth. No, wait- get this: Heronaldione Potter."

"What on earth- yes, I think that could work; I like that."

"We'll put it to them when we get back. How do you think Ginny'll take it?"

"Ginny, the woman who threw a fit because the stripes on the baby's manchester didn't match the wall colour? I think she'll be positively thrilled that we've named her child in utero."

"Our little contribution to its inevitable lifetime of being beaten to a pulp."

He tightens his arm around her stomach; she presses the tips of her fingers in a pattern on his forearm. "Cold?" he asks, tucking hair tangled by the salty wind behind her ear. "I'll light the fire soon."

"Mmm, we can move inside for dessert."

"Now, if that's a lightly veiled euphemism, Hermione, I've got to say-"

"Actually, I bought chocolate pudding and custard at the shops today. Shall we stop with the innuendoes, do you think?"

He shudders, and makes no attempt to move. She shifts against his leg and leans further back into his chest, as the sun sets directly opposite them, sinking behind the light waves. It's blissful and peaceful and marvellous; she's certain that of her brilliant ideas this is one of the better ones, and the two of them have been enjoying a weekend by the sea.

Half an hour later, though, when they're bustling side by side in the small kitchen, something changes, runs off its usual track the slightest bit. It's enough of a paradigm shift for the mood to be altered dramatically when her phone rings.

"Hello?"

"It's me."

"Oh, hi."

Ron pauses at the sink, drops the fork he had been scrubbing to listen. Neither of them notice the splash it makes, or the resulting splatter of bubbles across his front.

"Yeah, it's been lovely-"

"-No, the weather's marvellous; it's a bit cold, but at this time of year- yes, exactly."

"Very relaxing; you sound a bit jealous, there. Yes, I've had time to catch up with my reading – I'm almost finished that book."

He only hears her end of the conversation, but, from the furtive glance she shoots at him and the way she strolls to the door, he can pick her correspondent even through the faint tinniness that the phone gives Malfoy's voice. Sometimes, he feels as though he can handle all this shit – Malfoy's just a phase, it's something that Hermione's compassionate side needs to deal with before they can move on – but hearing her speak to him with such familiarity stings, makes him doubt himself.

How is Malfoy fine with this, he can't help but wonder? Surely the black-hearted adulterating hopeful would rather be in Ron's own spot, sitting with Hermione cradled against his legs, talking about the rest of their lives together. He rarely gives Malfoy credit for anything at all apart from his usual brand of asshole, but Ron does remember being stuck in the friend zone and the turmoil it wrought on his state of mind.

Even those memories, of his frustration and that particularly embarrassing spurt of time spent with Lavender Brown to make Hermione jealous, aren't enough to provoke any sort of pity for Malfoy. He is, effectively, the other woman – and his position on the gender spectrum is another of those things Ron's never going to admit out of pure spite.

Out of the corner of his eye, he catches an apologetic look from Hermione. She stretches her mouth and gives a shrug; _I'm sorry,_ her body language says, _but..._

She edges out of the kitchen, still cradling the phone against her ear. Through the dull glass breaking up the wall between the kitchen and the small living room, she holds up two fingers and mouths the same. 'Two minutes, and then-' She nods to the oven, and smiles warmly at him.

Pacified, but with barely-assuaged fears shrinking back, he turns to face the landscape outside. At very least, he's got to maintain the air of calm nothingness he'd taken to adopting recently. It's a far cry from his usual self, but arguing and bickering has gotten him nowhere on this issue and he's getting tired of running on the spot.

The waves have subsided and the sun tints them dark orange. It had been a stupendous find – Hermione's, of course – and they had gained ownership of the small beach house for the entire weekend, through some tenuous connection with a friend of a friend. The keys rattle in his pocket, unfamiliar, and he relishes the isolation from the rest of the civilised society it had become so exhausting to be a part of. Bit of a pity that with one jarring phone call, Malfoy had disrupted their peace and quiet.

Still- bloody hell, he can think of worse things to be doing right now.

"Sorry, sorry." She whips back into the room, business-like as ever, hanging up the phone and retying the ribbon of the apron behind her back. "I told him I had to go; we _were_ in the middle of dessert, after all."

"Bit of a nerve he's got, interrupting our holiday. No phones; that was _your_ rule."

"It's off now, I swear." She pushes hair back off her face with her elbow and grins coquettishly. "I'm all yours – no interruptions."

Having a weekend to themselves, at the height of privacy, with no unforeseen interruptions from Ginny or work or, god forbid, Draco, had been therapeutic. Hermione feels that, once in a while, this sort of thing is necessary. There were only so many times she was going to fall asleep in his house wearing only his socks and wake up with a crick in her neck from his stupidly soft pillows. Here, playing house for the weekend, a mix of unfamiliarity and his and hers... it was actually kind of nice.

To demonstrate her point, she stows her phone in the heavy (empty) cookie jar, where, even if it buzzes, it won't be heard by either of them. He seems to notice something inadvertent in her look, because he stops, with his hand on the smooth metal surface of the refrigerator. "Wait- is that what this is about? Escaping the temptation that is Malfoy?"

"No- what, Ron? Of course not."

"You said it yourself. It's been an age since we last went away; what other reason is there?"

"What, companionship and human contact isn't enough for you nowadays?"

She doesn't know how they got to where they are now. She had been trying to be considerate, to keep this weekend between the two of them. It's why she had taken Draco's phone call outside, to explain that she was busy with Ron at that moment and would talk to him later. It's why she had found a beach house far away from everyone at home, away from the distractions and the drama that they bring, and why she had stayed up several hours past her bedtime researching the cuisine of the area. Ron had made her happy, and she had wanted to return the favour.

"It shouldn't be so hard for you to use the word 'love', Hermione," he spits. His ears are red and sticky-outy, and he bristles with anger and, unless she's mistaken, an iota of fear.

"You're being ridiculous, Ronald," she counters fiercely, slamming the tray onto the counter. They always fight; they've always fought. It's their way of life, the way they maintain the balance and relieve their multitudes of tension. She would hide the remote, he would eat all the leftovers in her fridge – they could fight for hours, for days. This recent maelstrom of anger and worry – with Draco at the eye of it – was different. This was one of their serious fights, like when Ron had thought Crookshanks ate Scabbers, or when she had said no to him the first time. They were too grown up now to turn up their noses and refuse to speak to one another – they were supposed to be adults, for goodness' sake – but it would continue in the same ceaseless way until some sort of a stalemate was reached. If it had to be artificially engineered through feminine wiles and a good deal of manipulation, so be it.

But, in her usual stubborn manner, she notes that it's hardly up to her to be the one to back down each time. Yes, Draco was her fault, but she had been (in an insignificant, untruthful sort of way) perfectly willing to go on as they had been. If Ron was going to throw a tantrum every time they interacted, they would be better off to have left Draco out of their lives.

"_I'm_ ridiculous?"

"I can't win with you, can I? I try to keep on good terms with both of you, and that's a betrayal. I try to spend a weekend alone with you, and suddenly I'm _resisting temptation? _Tell me, Ronald, what do _you_ call that, if not utterly ridiculous?"

By the time they fall into bed, still brimming with anger, their pudding has been abandoned and the best part of the night has been shattered onto the kitchen floor, dribbling spilt milk. _There's no use crying over it_, Hermione thinks logically, feeling Ron angry and hard next to her, but in all her mature glory, there's no guide for how to behave while watching your relationship fall apart. She thinks that really, she has to follow her own rules, and yes, that means letting a few hot tears spill out onto the pillow.

* * *

It's late, later than any upstanding young man ought to be out and about, and he's had more to drink than he has in a year. A group of friends are in town for a bachelor party, and he finds himself sprawled on a bar stool with a party hat perched lopsided on his head, while most of the others sit in a circle around a stripper.

The music is loud, too loud, pounding in a steady beat of thumping bass against his eardrums. He's getting too old for this crap, but Goyle had begged him.

"Enjoying yourself?" Goyle's voice booms, made deeper by the drinks, in his ear, and at the same time his arm is secured in a vice grip around Draco's shoulders.

"It's great."

"And yet, you're sitting over here like a little bitch. What's wrong?"

"Absolutely nothing," he enthuses, and throws himself into the party with gusto. He isn't in the mood for a deep and meaningful chat with Goyle, and he's pretty sure that Goyle would rather be beneath the gyrating stripper than be slouched at the bar having a serious conversation. He throws back shot after shot, sticking to straight and hard instead of the prettily-named girl drinks some of the other guys are favouring. To be honest, he's overprotective of his manhood, and he's fairly certain that drinking an appletini would cause it to disintegrate in his pants. He'll do what he must to avoid such a situation.

He spends the rest of the evening – or, early morning, as Blaise Zabini reminds him in passing – avoiding the stripper (who's too blonde to catch his eye) and mingling with a dozen people he hasn't seen in years and has diligently tried to avoid. The fact that they all seem to have reformed themselves into upstanding citizens doesn't help his impulse to scatter, but he chats with them over the music until they're all, him included, sliding off their stools and off the walls that barely seem upright, and resting their chins in the puddles on the counter and dancing like maniacs in the middle of the bar.

By the time some kindly patron helps him into a cab, the bustle of the city, even at this time, is barely differentiated from the noise within the club. When he slides, dry heaving and moaning, into his bed, the silence is startling and drums a painful beat into his skull. He doesn't think of much before sleep catches up to him; his brain cells are all, each and every one, focused on maintaining the swirling nausea that cripples any vertical movement. One sly bugger, though, escapes long enough to flash an image of Hermione and Weasley, on their romantic beach weekend, into his head, and he reconsiders the stripper. Once upon a time, until recently, blondes had been all he liked to date, and once upon a time, he had been happy. He's lucid enough to register the correlation, for a single second before he sleeps.

* * *

Hermione feels Ron's knee pressing into the soft skin at the back of hers, just as she wakes. It's late, but the pressure is unmistakeably intentional. His fingers find her hips and squeeze gently. She doesn't roll over, but she tenses and releases her muscles, stretching to what extent she can without altering her position. He can tell she's awake, she knows.

"Hermione."

They trade apologies, talk about it a little. He voices his persisting insecurities, in a half-asleep, mumbling sort of way, and she reassures him for what feels like the millionth time since she ran into Draco on that train. Things go on, and when they fall back asleep minutes later, they are close, pressed together with bare skin touching and the softness of her pyjamas rubbing against the coarser fabric of his. Though his chin ducks over her shoulder and she rests her cheek against his hair, she can't help but feel that it isn't over, that the chasm between them at the beginning of the night would return. She pulls his arms tighter around her middle, and with unease brewing steadily in the pit of her stomach, falls back to sleep.


	11. Chapter 11

On a miscellaneous cold morning during a particularly dank week, Draco, swinging in his office chair and carefully avoiding Cordelia's piercing gaze on her way to the kitchen, dials Hermione's number.

"Hermione Granger, Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures."

"My, that's a mouthful and a half."

"One gets used to it."

"I'm sure _one_ does." Mischief colours his tone, but he lets it trickle back into his mouth and asks in a far more adult voice, "How are you?"

"I'm well, how are you?"

"Writing a report, bored out of my attractively-shaped skull. The usual."

"Ah, I see."

"Someone's taciturn," he notes, trying his very hardest to make it sound less obnoxious than it had in his head. He folds a post-it note as small as it will go and balances it on the knuckle of his middle finger. He's drawn a target in marker and taped it to the wall of his cubicle; there's a scoreboard hidden underneath his blotter. With a swift movement from his forefinger, he sends the pellet flying directly at the target. With what could either be a misplaced gust of hot air coming from the woman in the neighbouring cubicle or, alternately, god-awful aim, it misses completely and lands somewhere by his shoe. He doesn't pick it up immediately, but listens to the dim background conversation on Hermione's end.

"Mr Clemmons," she says suddenly into the phone as he strains to hear the quiet voices, "as promised, I have reviewed your claim and forwarded it on to our magical insurance staff, but I am growing increasingly more certain that, unless you can produce evidence that the, er, _dragon _made its way into your barn, we cannot deem it magical creature-related damage. We can, however, send out a team to analyse the wreckage and then our insurance department will work with you to figure out your next step."

He pauses, but realises what she's doing, what the conversation on her end had been about.

"Ron's there, hey?"

"Yes, exactly."

"What happened to him being fine with our _delightfully platonic_ friendship?" He isn't sure he's emphasised; he spends a moment feeling foolish, another several feeling the awkwardness of the conversation as it bites down on him.

After a moment more, of silence and of uncertainty, Hermione answers, "Mr Clemmons, we try not to inflame situations like this with investigations and the like."

"Inflame the situation? Not to belabour the metaphor, Hermione, but I'm assuming the 'situation' is him going his particular brand of insane and throwing one of those Weasley-specific tantrums?"

"That is indeed about the sum of it, sir." Is that guilt that he hears, tinging her tone, before the professionalism kicks back in?

"Well, just so long as it doesn't clash with his brilliantly flaming hair."

"Mr Clemmons! Please, let's keep this civil. I'm sure such language is unnecessary in this arena."

"I'm not so sure. How good are you at this game?" He leans back in his chair, fiddling with a new post-it note, and smirks. "Let's have lunch."

"Yes, I'm certainly open to a business luncheon, if you'd like to talk further about this in person. Of course, the Ministry of Magic is eager to cater to your requirements and we will do whatever we can to ensure an outcome that is amenable to both parties involved. The situation, however, is of a nature that I don't believe can be sorted out immediately. With the appropriate liaising between the departments on our end, we will surely eventually reach a desirable state of affairs for you."

He flicks the folded note and misses spectacularly; it winds up in the next cubicle over. "Marvellous," he says, switching ears. "Good to hear you're making such headway. I'll swing by."

"That's not necessary, sir. You needn't go out of your way for a business lunch."

He twiddles his thumbs for a moment and then supports the phone with his shoulder so he can fold up yet another paper pellet. "The usual place, then? At the same time? And you're sure you can get away from the old ball and chain?"

"Of course. That sounds splendid. I'll see you then, Mr Clemmons. I hope we can come to some sort of arrangement."

In the brief split second before she hangs up the phone, he hears Weasley, loud enough to be made out, now, saying, "Old man trying to score a date with you?"

"Oh, come now, he's a sweet old fool."

The line goes dead and he carefully places the phone back in its cradle on his desk. He glances up just in time to see Cordelia striding towards him, tottering on too-tall heels that let her stand almost at his height. He stands, out of politeness and to correctly measure her against him - the top of her head comes up to his eyebrows, now - but the expression on her face worries him.

"Could I have a word or two, Draco?" She's polite and professional; her heels clack away in that business-like manner as she walks in front of him. He scrambles out of his seat, trying too hard to combine friendly willingness with casual disinterest. His elbow catches on something on his desk; a folder of work tumbles to the floor. He pays it a minimal amount of notice and follows her towards the abandoned conference room.

His colleagues snicker and murmur; his pain is their pleasure. They've all heard, by now, about his mid-morning dash out of her apartment and his refusal to respond to the single message she left him. His comeuppance, in fact, will bring a great deal of closure to the entire floor.

"Cord-" His eyes widen as she strides past the boss' office, but the blinds are closed and they go unnoticed.

She closes the door carefully; she lines herself exactly with the misplaced vertical stripe that's been on the wall as long as he can remember. He sits in one of the empty chairs, the one closest to the door, feeling very much like a student about to be told off by an intimidatingly sexy professor. He finds himself forcing down hard balls of saliva, his throat muscles contracting painfully as though hooked on a few easy words he doesn't quite know how to pronounce.

"Cord-" He begins again, and immediately feels a fool for using her nickname. They've been distant for weeks now; it's an uncomfortable truth that he, in all likelihood, deserves whatever he gets.

"I understand, Draco. You don't have to avoid me."

He gapes a little, his mouth opening when he had intended to snap it shut, his clenched fists unfurling when he had meant to keep professional and guarded.

"What?" he says, uncertain and confused. He feels it's the safest bet, though he suspects to have an inkling of what she means.

She gives a light sigh, and points out, "We can be friends. I don't mind that you're hung up on this girl, whoever she is."

"Hung up?" he begins to splutter, but she continues as though she's deaf.

"I liked hanging out with you." She says it a little wistfully, and his mind drifts to inappropriate memories of coitus and the brief cuddling that came after. She looks at him, a grain of surprise blurred across her face, as though vaguely uncertain of what he was thinking about.

He feels a little stupid. For days he had worried, and then finally accepted, that things were irreparably wrecked between them. And, it wasn't as though he had cried himself to sleep over it – he's made enemies enough to be used to the feeling of another splintering connection – but they work together, and they had had a nice thing going. He hadn't wanted it to be awkward, for once.

At this point in time, he can't imagine a more awkward conversation. Perhaps it comes a close second to 'Draco, honey, I'm a dude', but he still feels uncomfortable and stilted with her standing tall in front of him.

He should have realised that Cordelia, while vain and silly and a little flighty, wasn't the type to care so much. He hadn't given her enough credit. It seemed a habit of his, nowadays – he doled it out inconsistently and often incorrectly.

(Sometimes, he wonders whether this business with Hermione is really worth all the effort.)

"We're still colleagues," she's in the middle of saying. "We work in the same building, eat in the same break room. We can be, you know- friends."

"Friends," he repeats slowly, standing so that balance is regained. He extends a hand as he affirms, "That's a plan I could live with."

She takes his hand, and there's a twinkle in her eye like she'd contemplated spitting into her palm, but their hands fall apart and they make their separate ways back to their places of work. He notices the jaunt in her step more than he usually does. His eye catches on the way her skirt flatters. He remembers, acutely, the way she likes for him to run his hands through her hair.

When it ticks over, that near imperceptible transition from awkward to friends to 'oh- _that's_ what I saw in you', he already wants her again.

* * *

He waits for her at the door when it comes time to leave that night, and doesn't miss the way her forehead crinkles in confusion when she sees him.

"Draco," she says, nodding at him as she tries to extricate her coat from the rack. "Decent day?"

"Yeah, not bad. Come for a drink with me."

She turns to glare at him, a little playfully, but mostly just weary. "Oh, come on. I'll meet you for yoghurt tomorrow, but we've established that drinking and us is _bad_, remember?"

Yes, he remembers. It's this memory that's at the root of him insisting.

"I'm sticking to soda," she warns him as they leave together, letting him use his hand on her back to guide her to a cab.

She fits in well at the bar, seems familiar enough in the old territory. She handles her glass delicately, she swings her feet from the bar stool in a way that draws his attention to her bare legs. And all the while, she's talking, and sipping, and perfectly natural and without a hint of the seductress in her at all. She tells him all about her day: about Sophie's drama and about how they were all excited for the work party that week. She clinks the rim of her glass against his, and eats all the peanuts she can get her hands on, and-

They climb into the same taxi and his hopes rise, just a little. She isn't shivering at all; her face is flushed light pink, perhaps from the cold, perhaps from those last few drinks she had succumbed to. He wants to be able to give her his coat, maybe to pull her a bit closer out of concern for her wellbeing, but she's buttoned up in her own thick jacket and sits primly in her own seat. He doesn't try to touch her – he knows how this works. She gives the taxi driver two addresses: hers and then his. As the car starts winding through a familiar route, he catches her grinning at him, out of the corner of his eye.

"I know what you're up to, Draco Malfoy," she stage-whispers, just loud enough that the driver hears, too. "It won't work."

"You won't let it," he points out, smiling a little in spite of himself.

"That's me - spoiling your evil schemes, time and time again." She laughs incredulously and fiddles with the clasp of her handbag, but looks at him now. "You're not as smart as you think you are, you know."

"I don't doubt that."

The silence is companionable and the car ride is short. He watches until she's safely inside her apartment building and then the taxi drops him at his. It's something he's not used to, with her, but he falls asleep alone in his own bed.

* * *

The next morning, Cordelia makes a beeline for him in a way that's becoming a habit, a daily tradition. He doesn't protest, in anything above an indignant whisper, as she tugs him away from the main office with something glinting in her eyes. Their boss twists in his office chair, begins to turn, but his phone rings just in time for them to avoid notice.

Surely, though, the slam as she forcibly throws him into the supply cupboard must awaken curiosity. She steps in after him and closes the door, sapping the thin strip of light and thrusting them into darkness. He intakes stale air sharply- she's suddenly very close, so close that her hot breath in his ear distracts him from her words:

He feels her cool hands flat against his chest. They remain there for a moment, and then, indulging his baser instincts, he kisses her hard against a shelf of pens and pencils. A few thin boxes fall, she jams her elbow into another, but she kisses him back and they end up coming very close to doing something inappropriate in the supply closet until someone busts them. A few casual murmurs, hot against each other's necks, set the parameters of their relationship – they'll keep it casual, she says, but he isn't sure how comfortable he is with her seeing other men. She points that it's hardly fair that he gets to lust away after the mystery girl if she isn't allowed to be with other people, too, and so they finally settle on _casual_.

He doesn't really spare Hermione a thought; if they're going to co-exist, him and her and Weasley, then Cordelia was entitled to join their circle. He oughtn't to feel guilty for spending time with another woman in a romantic context. After all, with Weasley and their rose petals and romantic weekends, she's hardly in a position to judge.

* * *

Judgement is the first thing to race to the front of Hermione's mind when Draco mentions, off hand, his continuing dalliance with a copy girl from upstairs.

(All right, perhaps it's the third or fourth, but bitterness and envy aren't characteristics she likes to claim possession of.)

"What did you say her name was, sorry?"

He glances up, barely guilty and barely meeting her eyes before he's reinserting his fork into his mouth and blathering on about how, "Oh, Cordelia - she's a great girl, finger on the pulse, thoroughly un-dense."

Wonderful. Wonderful, great Cordelia, with the name from, if she isn't mistaken – and for god's sake, she's Hermione Granger – a Shakespeare play, with supple breasts and naturally straight hair-

Bitch.

"That's fantastic," she hears herself saying, far off and a little too loud. "I'm sure she's a _great_ girl- just, great. We should have dinner some time, the four of us; I'm sure Ron's fears would be appeased if he knew you were banging some other girl instead-"

He raises his eyebrows over the rim of his water glass, stares at her with mixed curiosity and bemusement over the carafe. "_Other_ girl? Instead? Is Ronald concerned that we are banging?"

She blushes flaming red at her own crassness; sinks her gaze into the napkin on her lap to distract from his amused face on the opposite side of the restaurant table. "Of course not; that's not what I meant- I'm sorry, Draco, it's really none of my business."

He nods, carefully, into his salad, and then looks up. The bland music in the background has dimmed and the sound of their fellow diners and their tinkling cutlery swells. It's still too easy to pick up the sound of his voice, gentled and softened by a few moments of internal reflection, as he says, "I like her. She makes me laugh."

"Well." She flattens the napkin matter-of-factly against her lap, and sits upright. Draco has every right to have a casual girlfriend – indeed, to have a Very Serious one. She has her Ron, and now he has his Cordelia. It's all very neat and arranged, perfect paper packages tied up with string. However her overprotective platonic feelings for Draco may shape her view of this girl, whoever she is... really, they're friends. It comes with strings – not the neat perfect ones that tie them to their separate spouses. She has a duty to support him, regardless of which mindless female he chooses to seduce.

But really, she's probably a great girl.

Draco's eyebrows are contracted; he's waiting for whatever critical judgement she's about to pass on his BimboOfTheWeek.

She forces her voice, compacts it into the appropriately shaped words, into displaying nonchalant pleasure through her, "I'm sure she's lovely. I can't wait to meet her."

Relieved, he exhales. Straining with pretence, she takes a sip of water. He takes a measured bite of over-dressed cucumber. She affords him a brief smile at the face he inadvertently pulls. The dynamic is altered, just for a moment.

Just for moments that last through minutes. They eat in silence, more or less, and he bitterly regrets mentioning Cordelia (dating Cordelia, clapping eyes upon Cordelia), and she frets internally about whether she had come off too cold or too warm, whether he had misinterpreted and whether she had upset him.

"I should probably be getting back to work, soon. I'm on a spot of thin ice, at the moment."

She raises her eyebrows into her handbag, but doesn't comment on his latter sentence. "Oh, of course, so should I. Here, my shout, if you'd like to get going."

"No, Hermione, you don't have to do that."

"Really, I insist. You bought coffee, the other day."

"Yes, your two pound cup of _hot water_ is on par with my duck salad. Hermione. Really. Don't be such a man about this."

"I'm a man, now?"

"Yes- it's like I'm doing the cheque dance with another bloke. Please, put me out of my misery – let me win."

Their eyes meet; they're amused, now. They literally tug the leather sleeve back and forth for several seconds, until she releases it and coughs.

"Well, you're certainly not paying for my meal."

"I know you're all for welfare and equality of magical creatures-" She elbows him in the ribs, eyes wide, and nods at the Muggles surrounding them. "-ouch, Hermione. Really, though – aren't you taking it a bit far?"

"Though feminism is another of my passions, I'm not opposed to the concept of a free meal. There are, however, only two men in this universe who I allow to pay for me: my dad and- Ron."

The silence falls over them as abruptly as it had vanished. They end up waiting in line to split the bill in half, and it's uncomfortable, all in all. Their elbows jostle together and every now and again they shove one another lightly, but they barely speak, and their eye contact is fleeting and infrequent.

"So," Hermione begins, being one to beat a dead horse into mutilation, as they near the front of the congested line at the counter. "Are you going to tell me the romantic tale of how you and this girl met?"

Startled, he responds slowly. "Oh, Cordelia? It's not what you'd call romantic – we pretty much just started doing it on a semi-regular basis."

It was hardly the response she had wanted to hear.

He doesn't really understand what other response she had expected.

She narrows her eyes at him and he elaborates, somewhat untruthfully. "Oh, all right, if you insist on all the goopy details. I was riding the elevator up to work one day, and it stopped on the second floor and she stepped in, looking breathtakingly beautiful, and even in the crowded space our eyes met across the heads of all of our colleagues – she's practically an Amazon, did I mention? – and then, one by one, they left, until it was just the two of us left in that tiny little elevator, and all of a sudden, I knew that she was the one I wanted. And I got her. All the way up to the ninth floor. What _up_."

"You're repulsive." She laughs, however briefly, and sends her fist shooting lightly into his side before stepping forward to pay at the counter. Although it wasn't far from the truth, she seems content with faux-glaring at him all the way down the street (reassured that he doesn't care for this girl the way he does for her) and she's the one to suggest, "You know, I've got some time. Do you think you could sacrifice your spotless reputation for one last cup of coffee?"

He's only human, so he does. It's this, this dreadful habit of his, that means that he has only qualms enough to be suppressed immediately about, on his unpunctual return to the office, arranging to spend the night at Cordelia's and again, barely considering Hermione. In fact, he does a good number of things, twice that evening and the following morning, where he doesn't have to think about Hermione (much) at all.


End file.
